MILLIONS OF Ghanaians may on a daily basis complain about lack of employment opportunities and economic hardships.
But despite the fact that they complain of economic hardships and lack of employments, they certainly are not idle on a daily basis but are actually able to raise the resources needed – internet data, smartphones, computers – to keep themselves active on the internet, particularly social media.
This has earned Ghana the 9th position globally in terms of hours spent on social media.
Ghanaians spend considerably longer hours online than their African counterparts, which could mean that the West African nation spend significant amount of cash on internet bundles for accessing social media.
The amount of time spent on the internet is usually linked to cost affordability associated with personal income level or the free provision of internet facilities such as hotspots by the state.
Program Manager of the CyberCrimes Unit at the Council of Europe, Matteo Lucchetti, made this known on Monday, March 18, 2019, at a workshop held in Accra on the implementation of the Budapest Convention on Cyber Crime.
He said “you might be surprised to know that Ghana is in the top ten countries (9th) in the world for number of hours spent per day on social media.”
According to him, in 2018, a million new internet users came online everyday.
That, he said, represented 11 persons per second.
He also averred that 4.4 billion people are connected to the internet today, out of 7.5 billion.
He added that in 2018, nearly 3.5 billion people actively used at least one social network – that’s almost 50 percent of the world population, including kids and elderly.
However, he noted that while digitization offered many development opportunities to achieve a better future, an equivalent rise must be registered to crimes committed against or through the use of computer systems.
Currently, the Budapest Convention is the reference international treaty on cyber crime, and according to Mr. Lucchetti, it provides consistent definitions of conducts to be criminalized, procedural powers for criminal justice authorities, and provisions to effectively cooperate internationally.
Ghana acceded to the Convention in November 2018, as first among the Anglophone countries of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) region.
BY Melvin Tarlue