By Issah Mohammed, GNA
Accra, Dec. 13, GNA Dr. Kenneth Ashigbey, the Chief Executive Officer of the Ghana Chamber of Telecommunications, has urged Ghanaians to create room for emerging Ghanaian innovations to make mistakes and improve.
He observed that the lack of patience to allow emerging Ghanaian innovations to thrive has often led to needless comparison with well-established competitions that destroy homegrown initiatives and innovations in the long run.
“A lot of our challenges arise because of our lack of belief in ourselves. We are too critical of ourselves. We are not allowing ourselves to make mistakes when we decide to do things. We are kinder to others when they make mistakes,” he said.
He was speaking at the second edition of the Made-in-Ghana Summit, which was held on the theme “The Role of Public-Private Partnership (PPP) in Sustainable Digital Transformation.”
Dr. Ashigbey called for the needed investment in digital technologies that could provide opportunities and accelerate progress towards the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG).
“We need to take some intentional strategic steps to ensure that we don’t stop at being consumers of technology but also start being the producers of technologies,” he said.
Professor Kwaku Appiah-Adu, Senior Policy Advisor to the Vice President, observed that the public sector tends to lag private companies when it comes to adopting technologies like AI, machine learning, and robotic process automation.
In most instances, he noted that public sector organisations and agencies tend to face challenges of digitising on a large scale and at an ambitiously fast rate due to a lack of investment in resources in technology research and development.
He said that PPP can form the cornerstone of a successful move to digitisation as they provide an effective strategy for bringing together the resources and technical expertise needed to deliver digital transformation goals.
Highlighting the role of PPP in the improvement of public sector service delivery, Mrs. Jemima Oware, Chief Executive Officer of the Office of the Registrar of Companies (ORC), recounted how her outfit and the Ghana Revenue Authority benefited in 2011 under the Ghana Electronic Governance project.
She said the PPP project with GCNET as the private partner and the Government of Ghana represented by the Ministry of Communication as the public partner resulted in the development and deployment of an e-registrar application as well as the Total Revenue Information Processing System (TRIPS).
“The object of the project in 2011 was to modernize the Registrar General Department in relation to our business registration processes, which had been partly manual, and improve revenue generation,” she said.
GNA