Vice President Dr Mahamudu Bawumia has said one main challenge that African countries face in their attempt to transform their economies is the lack of data and transparent systems.
According to the Vice President, most African countries take decisions in the governance and management of their economies without any proper and consolidated data.
That, he noted had resulted in economic policies and decisions not realising the expected outcomes.
Dr Bawumia in an address at the 2023 African Development Conference held at the Harvard University in the United States of America said regrettably, most “African Governments are taking critical decisions without being informed by the data”.
Aware of this challenge, Dr Bawumia said “When our government assumed office in 2017, we made the ambitious decision to address all the problems of the lack of unique identity, address systems, etc. immediately and simultaneously.”
He said the government’s decision was to quickly transform the country’s economy by leveraging on technological innovations as a means to leapfrog the development process, overcome legacy problems, and improve both economic and public sector governance.
“We chose digitalization as the vehicle and this is why digitalization has been a major area of focus for our government,” Dr Bawumia stated.
He reemphasised that if data is the new oil, then digitization is the most efficient and cost effective vehicle for generating the data,” adding: “Without this data, African countries will not be able to effectively participate in the fourth Industrial Revolution.”
Delving into the key areas of transformation that he noted have been critical to Ghana’s digitisation revolution, Dr Bawumia said the introduction of a biometric national identification system in Ghana has been a game-changer in several ways.
More than 17 million people (over 80% of the targeted adult population), enrolled in the secured national database. With the Ghanacard, the identity of people (even dead people) can be established using their fingerprints.
It is one of the most transformational projects implemented under Ghana’s digitalization drive.
According to the Vice President, the giver had solved a problem of providing unique identity to the country’s population. “A problem we have lived with since independence 66 years ago.”
Dr Bawumia revealed that the government had also began a pilot and would likely roll out a nationwide system of providing National ID numbers to children at birth from June this year.
He also mentioned the Property Addressing System, Mobile Money Interoperability, Digitalized Tax Payment System amongst several other reforms that are driving Ghana’s economic growth.
Rex Mainoo Yeboah, ISD
