That, it said, would prevent unauthorised access to public information, a situation it said could pose security threats to the country.

Giving the directive at a breakfast meeting organised by the National Information Technology Agency (NITA) to engage officials of the public sector in discussions, the sector Minister, Mrs Ursula Owusu-Ekuful, said the directive was imperative.

The meeting was a platform for NITA, the facilitator of the government’s Information and Communication Technology (ICT) for accelerated development and the provider of Internet instruments for the public service, to discuss how collaboration between NITA and the public service could be improved to enhance productivity and efficiency in the sector.

Mrs Owusu-Ekuful said another challenge with using private emails for official transactions “is that when a public official leaves his post, official data is taken along.”

She, therefore, called on all ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) that were yet to enrol on the NITA platform to do so with all urgency.

NITA

NITA is a public service institution established in 2008 as the ICT policy implementing arm of the Ministry of Communications.

It is responsible, among others, for implementing Ghana's IT policies.

Mrs Owusu-Ekuful said the government had identified ICT as a key tool for national development and would leverage on existing telecommunications-related infrastructure and investments such as the National Data Centre, the Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence and the Ghana Technology University College to achieve its vision.

She identified NITA as critical stakeholders in the attainment of the government’s ICT vision and called on all public agencies to collaborate with it for maximum results.

She added that the ministry, for its part, would collaborate effectively with NITA to ensure that all challenges with the government ICT infrastructure were addressed to ensure efficiency and productivity.
She cautioned that no MDA should acquire any ICT solution, infrastructure or strategy without first consulting the government through NITA.

That, she said, was to prevent wasting money on ICT instruments that might have been already purchased, as well as ensure the compatibility of the instrument to the broader existing national ICT infrastructure.

Financial obligations

In his welcome address, the Acting Director General of NITA, Mr Jeffrey Konadu Addo, appealed to the MDAs to honour their financial obligation to NITA to enable the agency to serve them better.

He debunked the notion that NITA was a government establishment and, therefore, the MDAs did not have to pay for its services.

Mr Addo explained that while the government had provided the infrastructure for it to import and distribute internet to the public service, NITA bought the internet and, therefore, users had to pay for its use.

He pointed out, however, that the use of NITA’s services by the public sector was obligatory.

Mr Addo assured the MDAs that the agency would collaborate with them to ensure that they would meet their ICT needs.

Making a contribution, the Acting Deputy Director General of NITA, Mr Kwaku Ofori Kyei, said the agency would consult and engage all end users on a regular basis in resolving IT related issues.

For her part, the Director of IT Applications at NITA, Mrs Veronica Boateng, said the agency had been mandated to provide a strategic plan to deploy IT to all public sector workers.

She said NITA had created a platform to help provide e-mail solutions for public sector workers and “among them are E-Parliament, E-Procurement, E-Justice and E-Workspace.”