Mr George Andah, a Deputy Minister of Communications, says government is leveraging on digital technology to advance the agricultural sector adding that the National Property addressing System, National Identification System and the National Interoperability Payment platform are the key pillars.
Under the Property Addressing System, he said, it was helping to address the issue of land tenure system, land administration and land management issues by ensuring that there was sufficient data for demarcating people's farms to prevent conflicts in land utilisation in the agricultural sector.
He said the National Identification System was intended to ensure that government provides services such as agriculture extension services to farmers or right persons at the right time while the Mobile Money Interoperability platform was promoting a cash-lite society for financial inclusion and enabling farmers to pay for goods and services, as well as access banking services to advance their needs.
Mr Andah touted the country's ICT credentials at the ongoing African Green Revolution Forum (AGRF) during a plenary discussion on "Advancing Digital Strategies at Country Level" in Accra on Thursday.
The AGRF is the tenth edition, which is the brainchild of former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who was the founding chairperson of the Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa, hence the forum was moved to Accra this year, to coincide with the one-year anniversary of his passing.
The event is the world's premier forum for African agriculture, pulling together stakeholders in the agricultural landscape to discuss and commit policies, programmes and investments to achieve an inclusive and sustainable agricultural transformation across the African Continent.
The forum attracted some 2,500 delegates from 79 countries in Africa and across the globe, including Heads of State, Ministers of Agriculture, Central Bank Governors, captains of industry, development partners, representatives of farmer organizations, youth entrepreneurs and other critical stakeholders; and it is being held under the theme: "Grow Digital: Leveraging Digital Transformation to Drive Sustainable Food Systems in Africa".
It focuses on three areas- leveraging on the digital technology to leapfrog Africa's agricultural sector into the future, empowering private sector and SMEs and tackling challenges with the climate change.
Mr Andah said that government was retooling the Ghana Meteorological Service to provide accurate information on weather forecast so that farmers could predict the rainfall pattern to plan planting of seeds or crops.
More so, there was a GPRS App that enabled fishermen to locate fish stock in the sea while farmers could hire trucks to plough their farms at reduced cost.
Additionally, there was an ICT App whereby farmers could use it to access extension services, especially with the application of fertilizers, pesticides and other agro-chemicals in their farms with the right quantity as well as access prices of goods on the market using esoko data.
The Deputy Minister explained that Ghana's information technology communication journey started in 2003 with the introduction of the ICT for Accelerated Development Policy focusing on exploitation and deployment of ICT in the various sectors of the economy.
The policy, he said, aimed at modernising agriculture for agribusiness industry and promoted public and private investments, developed back-born infrastructure with national fibre network to propel growth and enhance rural telephony to facilitate communication.
He said 16 years down the line, the dynamics in agriculture modernisation had challenged tremendously with the advent of digital technology, leading to the review of the ICT Policy to drive execution of excellence so that Ghana could fully benefit from the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Technological advancement, he said, had changed the way society do business, irrespective of the sector one belonged and, thus, bettering the lots of the people around the world.
In view of that, he said government of Ghana had seized the opportunity to create the building blocks to sustain the digital technological growth in order to harness the benefits and advantages inherent it.
He said Akufo-Addo's government had concerned itself with a drive towards digital technology to facilitate delivery of public services and create an enabling environment for solutions to address the current and anticipated needs of the citizens through sustainable policies and programmes.