Vice President Dr Bawumia
Public sector workers are expected to benefit from digitised salary payments from July, this year.
Vice President Dr Mahamudu Bawumia disclosed this on Tuesday in Accra when he officially opened the 3rd German African Business Summit (GABS).
According to him, the new measure, which is aimed at attaining cashless government transactions, comes in the wake of the successful implementation of the mobile money interoperability infrastructure which was designed to facilitate the seamless electronic payments for government services.
“As of today, we have about 34.5 million mobile money subscribers in the country, and the interoperability infrastructure allows payments to be made from bank accounts to mobile accounts and the other way round. With this infrastructure, we want to deal with the problem of financial inclusion so by the middle of the year the government will move away from the use of physical cash as payment for services. This is the Ghana we are trying to build,” he said.
He also announced that Cabinet has passed an auto policy framework for all investors in the auto industry.
“We also want to do pharmaceuticals and other inroads, and so there is a lot of opportunity in the industrial sector, the oil and gas area. By the way Ghana has just found new reserves of oil and Aker field, and we expect to double our oil production in the next few years which again provide opportunities for a lot of the downstream manufacturing of fertilisers and so on that we want to see. There are other opportunities in the petrochemical space. So we are making a lot of progress in many areas to grow this economy.”
He said government wants investors to enjoy a new digitised Ghana, which would transform the country’s economy in the next three years.
By Samuel Boadi