Mrs. Ursula Owusu-Ekuful with some pupils at the Tolon Community ICT Centre
Minister of Communications and Digitalisation, Ursula Owusu-Ekuful, as part of her five-day working visit to the Northern Region, has commissioned a Community ICT Centre at Tolon.
The Tolon Community ICT Centre has been equipped with 15 computers, 15 UPS, furniture, one executive office, a projector, a television, a scanner, a photocopy machine, a printer, and internet connectivity.
The ICT Lab forms part of projects under the Ghana Investment Fund for Electronic Communications, (GIFEC), which is aimed at providing opportunities and facilities to bridge the digital gap in the country.
“ Capacity building was the most important component of digitization and there is the need to equip institutions with the requisite tools to train people to gain the required knowledge relevant to technology in the society.”
The Ministry of Communications and Digitalization is bridging the digital divide by equipping 305 ICT laboratories in senior secondary schools across the country with ICT resources through the eTransform Project.
According to the Minister, the Tolon Community ICT Centre is one of the 30 newly built centres across the country in the last few years by the government.
She appealed to the people of Tolon and its environs to ensure that they maintain the centre for the benefit of the youth especially students in the district.
The Paramount Chief of the Tolon Traditional Area, Retired Major Sulemana Abubakari, thanked the Ministry for the ICT Centre and for setting up the Sustainability Management Committee to ensure that the Community ICT Centre is protected and maintained.
The Minister also commissioned three Rural Telephony sites at Tibungu, Jagriguyili, and Nagbligu in the Kumbungu and Tolon Districts.
As part of government’s digitalization agenda, which aims to create a strong digital economy and sustainable development throughout the country, government has constructed 3,000 cell sites under GIFEC’s Ghana Rural Telephony and Digital Inclusion Project to provide basic telephone voice and data connectivity to underserved and unserved communities in Ghana.
She indicated that extending connectivity is capital-intensive and expensive, hence these remote villages would have been blocked off and unable to take part in the digital revolution that is progressively taking place in the country if not for government intervention.
The Minister disclosed that GIFEC has constructed 45 telephone masts in the Northern Region as part of the Rural Telephony Project adding that 25 out of the 45 are operational.
BY Eric Kombat, Tolon