The Minister for Communications and Digitalization, Ursula Owusu-Ekuful, is of the view that the recent internet challenge is a blessing in disguise for Ghana.
Acknowledging the frustration caused, Mrs Owusu-Ekuful stated it was a wake up call for government to build the requisite telecommunication infrastructure.
“So, I see what has happened in the past few days as a bit of a blessing in disguise to focus our attention on the need to invest even more in providing connectivity to all parts of the continent and our country, because it can help us leapfrog,” she stated.
The Minister who was speaking at the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Summit in Accra on Monday highlighted the digital infrastructure is already underway has been phenomenal.
“We did that with banking when we didn’t put in place the normal banking infrastructure but moved towards mobile banking. We’ve done that in a few other areas. And we can use the digital infrastructure to transform the economies of the continent if we invest in putting them in place.
“We’ve put in place a government connectivity network with the support of the World Bank, which is nationwide. We intend to layer on that and the infrastructure that we already have in place,” she added.
On March 14, some Ghanaians had challenges assessing their internet on their gadgets, a development the Ghana Chamber of Telecommunications attributed to outages on multiple submarine fibre optic cables.
The Chamber explained some of the cables are down while others are delivering limited capacity.
However, the Minister has state government in the short term must put measures in place to provide connectivity for Ghanaians.
“We need to look at resilient infrastructure. We need to look at climate-friendly infrastructure. We need to look at more scalable systems being put in place, and we need to look at working even closer together with the private sector.
” These are all takeaways that we have from this. We’re doing it, but we need to scale up our effort,” she noted.
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