‘Big Data’ to boost economy digitization – Ursula

The government of Ghana is leaving no stone unturned with measures deployed to fully digitalize the economy for easy accessibility of information across all sectors, processing of it, among other valuable functions.

The new addition is the deployment of ‘Big Data’– with its sectorial models focuses on Healthcare, Agriculture, Governance, Trade, Security, Education, Finance, Disaster Management and Recreation.

The Minister responsible for Communications and Digitalisation, Mrs. Ursula Owusu-Ekuful, who made this revelation at the World Development Report by the World Bank said, the ‘Big Data’ addition is expected to come with the needed data analytics platform which will help make proper sense of all the data being mined across government sectors.

According to her, it will also help government track trends across the ecosystem, make projections based on data modelling techniques that will be critical for decision making across board.

“You cannot talk about the data economy without talking about the generation of data and its storage, particularly where the data is located (data sovereignty and residency issues), how you exchange data as a utility, data governance framework to protect data abuse and data privacy issues, connectivity which is foundational to the generation and exchange of data and, identity management to build trust on a personal or corporate level.

“The government of Ghana is currently working on deploying Big Data across government to rationalize the collection, processing, storing and sharing of data among government agencies. This is expected to be the next major jump in our journey to completely digitize our economy.  Big Data is expected to come with the needed data analytics platform which will help make proper sense of all the data being mined across government” she disclosed.

Giving more clarity on the subject matter, the Ablekuma West lawmaker said, the Big Data regime will bring on board transparency – which has been a major calling point from citizens, in addition will be the needed efficiency of how it would be utilized.

She added, “The Big Data regime is expected to bring transparency and efficiency in the way data is utilized. The built-in artificial intelligence component will ensure real time update of the different models for different stakeholders. Government will then be able to make policy decision based on data science and communicate effectively to citizens who would have access to the same data. This should improve on the trust relationship between government and citizenry.”

On the commercial side, she pointed out government is looking to model a regulated commercial framework around big data adding that, it will encourage institutions, both private and public, to generate more data.

The Data Exchange Hub: will provide the infrastructure, protocols and framework for data sharing across public and private sectors. It will provide the needed APIs to integrate with critical government systems to provide data input in real time, the cost of data (hits) and the use of the data that is accessed will be managed through the data governance framework to minimise data abuse and privacy issues.

Data Governance Framework: The Big Data initiatives is expected to be deployed with a data governance framework which will define data value, data exchange protocols, security channels and protocols, data governance hierarchy, data exchange dispute resolution protocols, etc.

Rural Telephony Project for Connectivity: The underlying infrastructure to ensure that government get more value out of this data ecosystem it is building. GIFEC through the rural telephony project is extending connectivity to the most rural part of the communities with shared community base stations to allow all telco providers to be able to provide services to the rural folks without the CAPEX overhead on the part of the telco providers. This will facilitate access to the data ecosystem.

Ghana Card Integration for Identity of Persons and Corporates: The ongoing integration of the Ghana Card as the identity platform for persons across the ecosystem is part of the effort to sanitise, standardise and share data across the ecosystem. The Ghana Card is providing single identity services to persons whiles RGD is expected to provide single identity to institutions and companies across the ecosystem to build trust. This government believes will help in the standardisation of data across all platforms.