Ghana's effort to make ICT a front and a centre to liberate people from ignorance and poverty is not yet over for stakeholders to relax, Mr Gideon Quarcoo, Deputy Minister of Communication has said.
Speaking at a stakeholder forum on the LICOM project on Friday organised by the Science and Technology Policy Research Institute (STEPRI), he said: "our fight is a liberation fight and we are all libration fighters to bring ICT to the remotest parts of our world".
The forum was to disseminate preliminary findings of a study carried out under the LICOM project and to solicit for peoples' comments and opinions to enrich the report.
LICOM Project, a sub-regional study, involves countries such as Ghana, Benin, Senegal and Nigeria aims at contributing to a better understanding of the international challenges of liberalization of Trade in ICT services in order to encourage the formulation of policies conducive to the development of ICT and private sector in West Africa.
Mr Quarcoo said research in Ghana and Africa as a whole, had largely suffered a number of serious deficiencies regarding its application.
"For us policy makers, we constantly realize the discrepancy between practical development planning and what policy requires from available research materials," he said and underscored the importance of the forum.
He said the challenges associated with the liberalization of trade in ICT services needed to be addressed with all the seriousness it deserves especially given the fact that the ICT sector is an all pervasive sector.
Mr Quarcoo said government having identified ICT as key to economic growth, has enacted a number policies and regulations to ensure effective regulation of the sector.
He said the National Communication Authority has ensured a level playing field for players in the industry which had resulted in a mobile subscriber base of 15,318,225 as of January 2010 with all operators offering valued added services.
Ghana, he added, had created a robust and aggressive market for the exploding of wireless telecommunication industry whose growth had been strong.
Mr Quarcoo said the NCA would soon introduce the Number Portability project, where mobile users would be able to migrate from one service provider to another without having to change one's number. "This will serve to mitigate any monopolistic tendencies."
Given an overview of the LICOM Project, Dr Godfred Frempong, a Director at STEPRI, said the project activities include surveys on the key legal instruments regulating trade in ICT goods and services liberalization, study on the characterization of ICT goods and services in West Africa and research to access the costs and benefits of the General Agreements on Trade in Services (GATS) under the World Trade Organisation for ICT services.
Explaining the methodology of the studies, he said, literature reviews were carried on all the various regulations in the sub region, questionnaires were administered, focused group discussion carried as well as informant interviews.
He said the recommendations of the studies were intended to assist public decision makers and the private sector to take advantage of the opportunities of liberalization of trade on ICT services.