Vice President Dr Mahamudu Bawumia has outlined an ambitious plan to build about one million Ghanaian digital talents as part of his transformative Digital Ghana vision.
Addressing Ghanaians on Wednesday to unveil his vision for the country if elected President, Dr Bawumia said he would build a Digital Ghana, which would apply technology to transform key sectors of the economy, including agriculture, healthcare, education, manufacturing and the financial sector for a prosperous digital economy to make Ghana a digital hub and create jobs for the youth.
To help realise the Digital Ghana vision, Dr Bawumia also disclosed that he would build the digital talents Ghana needs for the global digital revolution and outlined plans to train at least 200,000 youth per year on digital software skills.
“I want to see Ghana build the digital talent we require for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This will mean providing digital and software skills to hundreds of thousands of youth. In collaboration with the private sector, we will train at least 200,000 youth per year for the next five years. This, along with other policies, will create jobs for the youth, including school dropouts.
“I also want to enhance the repositioning of the education system towards STEM, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence and vocational skills to cope with the demands of the fourth Industrial Revolution. In collaboration with the private sector, we will aim to train at least 1,000,000 software developers in five years (200,000 per year). As software developers. They will have job opportunities worldwide.”
Dr Bawumia expressed confidence that the Ghanaian has the talent and what it takes to be number one in the world in many areas but is often derailed by pessimism and impossibility mindsets, adding that his government will champion the mindset of possibilities to bring out the best from every Ghanaian.
“I want to encourage Ghanaians to have a mindset of possibilities and not impossibilities.
“The challenges we must overcome as a country are too important to let our political differences derail us. There is a critical failure of mindset that manifests itself in the absence of core values, patriotism and principles within our society. We need to invigorate the can-do spirit of the Ghanaian to believe that we can even do better than the advanced countries if we put our minds to it,” he said.
He cited students from Mamfe Girls and Prempeh College who have won international robotic competitions against their peers in the US, Germany and South Korea and asked the youth to apply the same mindset of beating the world in robotics.
“This must be inculcated in our children from school. This is why we are going to introduce a growth mindset curriculum to help students build critical skills such as problem solving, risk-taking, opportunity spotting and design thinking,” he noted.
Rex Mainoo Yeboah, ISD
