The projects are Rural Technology Project (RTP), Digital for Inclusion (D4I) - Smart Community, School Connectivity and Institutional Support Project, Community ICT Pronect (CICT) and Satellite Hub Project.

The others are ICT Education, Capacity Building and Awareness, Capacity Building for Informal Sector, Coding for Kids, Emergency and Operational Call Centre (ECC) and Citizen/Government Relation (311).

Mr Abraham Osei Asante, the Administrator of the GIFEC, said this in an interview to the Ghana News Agency in Accra.

Explaining the rationale of the projects, he said, the RTP extends the coverage of mobile telephone services to areas in the country, where access to such services are not readily available and where existing licensed operators have proven unwilling or unable to expand their networks, due to commercial or other constraints.

Mr Asante said the ultimate objective of the program is to achieve  100 per cent mobile telephone service coverage throughout the country and to increase telephone subscribership to as many citizens as possible.

He said GIFEC has provided connectivity, both data and voice services, to 400 rural telephony sites covering about 2,000 communities and connecting about 2million citizens.

“This milestone has been possible through close collaboration with MTN Ghana and Huawei and its first part of hundred sites have been inaugurated by President Akufo-Addo at Abenaso”.

Mr Asante said the “Smart Community Project” is a project designed to provide affordable/free WIFI internet service to connect the unserved or underserved communities across the country.

He said the Smart Community Project is a base/access point for providing all other broadband services to communities including but not limited to Digital For Inclusion(D4I), Content, Entertainment, e-Services (e-Utilities, e-Transform, e-Health, e-Learning, e-Police, etc).

Beneficiaries of the project were: Police, Schools, Market Places, Hospitals and farmers, etc.

In 2017, GIFEC piloted the project in four communities namely; Goaso, Brekum, Asankragua and Asumura.

“About 2,000 communities have been provided with connectivity and are at the initial stage of the smart community process”.

The GIFEC Administrator said the school connectivity project seeks to equip selected deprived schools with computers and accessories and the provision of internet connectivity, adding that under the project, a total of 300 schools had benefited within the period under review. 

He said the CICT project involves the establishment of public access ICT Centres within designated locations, to provide community-wide access to full ICT services at publicly available locations, adding, till date, 241 Community ICT centres have been constructed.

Mr Asante said, upon assumption of office in 2017, only 28 CICT representing 11.6 per cent were operational and that efforts are being made to refurbished and equip all the centres to make them fully functional as part of the Digitalized Ghana Agenda under the Nation Builders Corps (NABCO) in   partnership with GIFEC.

He said one of GIFEC’s mandates is to provide internet point of presence and basic telephony services to bridge the digital divide between the served, underserved and unserved communities in the country.

He said the Satellite Hub was a response to the above needs and that currently, about 300 VSATs internet sites have been installed and 30 RTP have been integrated to the hub.

“GIFEC will continue to connect the remotes communities through the hub while exploring other technologies available in the beneficiary communities”.

Mr Asante said the goal of the ICT education, capacity building and awareness program was to reinforce and expand the use and benefits of ICTs for the general public, by supporting a range of capacity building, education, and awareness projects, both independent and in connection with other GIFEC projects.

 He said the project has trained 363 teachers with the emphasis at the basic level of education in Ghana who have also trained over 60,000 students in their respective schools.

“GIFEC, a lead module implementing partner under the Digitize module is collaborating with NABCO to deploy 1,487 trainees to the CICs and other ICT centres across the country and some volunteers will also be engaged to promote the ICT usage in the unserved/underserved areas”.

Mr Asante said 10,000 persons from the informal sector, such as beauticians, seamstress and tailors, carpenters, mechanics etc have benefited from ICT capacity training.

He said under the coding for kids’ project which is being implemented in 150 schools across the country, school children are being introduced to basic programming and the use of the computer and over 4,500 students have been trained since its inception.

Mr Asante said GIFEC in collaboration with Bureau of National Communications (BNC) have deployed emergency call centres in Kumasi, Accra and Tamale with the short code of 112 to attend to emergency situations across the country and that works were currently on-going to increase the centres to five by the second quarter of next year.

He said the citizen/government relations project is a partnership between GIFEC and the Ministry of Information and BNC to provide a single-point-of-access for people to find information about government services, policies, make complaints, or report problems. 

This project, he said, allows citizens to make inputs and allows government to “push” information to the citizenry as well as conduct surveys to elicit feedback on governmental issues.

He said the overall objective of the project is to facilitate citizen access to government services and represent a convenient gateway into a single-point-of-access citizen service model.

“The architecture of the systems allows a multi-channel service model, which includes, voice interaction, messaging (sms, whatsApp), Social media (Facebook,Twitter etc) as well as deployed applications on smartphones and the Ministry’s website for citizen services”.

Mr Asante said some of the benefits of the initiative are:  increased access by giving citizens one convenient number to call for all non-law enforcement government services, spot trends early and allow government to take corrective action before problems become major issues.

“Other benefits are the elevation of citizen’s perception of government’s service delivery to ‘best of class’ status, make information more readily available and improve citizen satisfaction and communication”, he said.