Ghana In The World Map Of ICT

GHANA MAP

By Mawutodzi K. Abissath

There is this simple Ewe proverb which prompts us that: “If Sunday will be a glorious day, it would reflect on the preceding Saturday”.

Ghana seems to be poised for glorious days in the coming year and beyond. In fact, if I were to pretend to be a clairvoyant, and looking into a crystal ball, I would predict that the year 2005 would be sparking for Ghana indeed.

The just-ended general election, which was universally acclaimed to be one of the best in recent political history of the country, has set the tone for magnificent things to follow. It has come to the attention of this writer that numerous foreign journalists who covered the 2004 elections marveled about the civility with which Ghanaians went about the entire event.

Some of them were amazed to learn for the first time that Ghana was the first country in black Africa to obtain independence in 1957. So they wired very inspiring stories about Ghana, hailing and praising Ghanaians to the blue heaven. Sadly, most of their foreign media institutions deliberately buried their faces in the sand like the proverbial ostrich as if those beautiful things did not exist in Ghana.

They refused to publish or broadcast the stories because they were positive in content and scope. They thought Ghanaians were primitive people who would start slaughtering and butchering each other and drive their women and children into refugee camps in the tropical forest because of elections. That would have been what the foreign media preferred to project about Ghana and Africa as they are wont to do.

Anyway, the actual reason why I am writing this article is to alert all Ghanaian journalists, and for that matter African media practitioners that Ghana is starting the year 2005 with a mammoth Information and Communication Technology (ICT) event that must be promoted and projected by the media.

Coming February, precisely from the 2^nd to 4^th, 2005, Ghana will host an international conference in the capital city of Accra. The conference is simply dubbed: African Region World Summit on Information Society (WSIS) Preparatory Conference. Ghana has hosted conferences upon conferences in the past. But this conference is one that will strategically plant Ghana in the center of the world of ICT.

The conference is expected to bring over one thousand delegates made up of ICT gurus, media professionals, academicians, politicians, scientists, engineers, legal experts, agriculturalists, technologists, educationists, human rights activists, NGOs, the private sector, civil society, development partners and many more. And if Ghana does not gain anything at all out of this conference, the hospitality industry of the country would not close their doors without a few dollars in their coffers.

But the real purpose of the conference is for Africa to use the Accra event to build consensus to place the continent in a position where it will harness the potential of information and communication technology to promote the development goals of the Millennium Declaration before another summit scheduled for November 2005 in Tunis, Tunisia.

Documents available from the WSIS Accra National Planning Committee under the chairmanship of the Hon. Mike Gizo MP indicate that Ghana is ready to offer the world one of the memorable events in technological history of the globe.

The genesis of this whole WSIS business started in December 2001 when the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 56/183 ordering that the world summit on information society must be structured and fashioned out in two phases.

Consequently, the first phase was held in Geneva, Switzerland from 10^th to 12^th 2003.The second phase is what scheduled to take place in Tunisia.

It is imperative to put on record that it was as the Geneva summit this Declaration of Principles was made among other things:

“ We, the representatives of the peoples of the world, assembled in Geneva from 10-12 December 2003 for the first phase of the World Summit on the Information Society, declare our common desire and commitment to build a people-centred, inclusive and development-oriented Information Society, where everyone can create, access, utilize and share information and knowledge, enabling individuals, communities and peoples to achieve their full potential in promoting their sustainable development and improving their quality of life, premised on the purposes and principles of the chapter of the United Nations and respecting fully and upholding the Universal Declaration of Human Rights”.

Respected reader, if you find the first paragraph of that declaration, which I have quoted verbatim, mouthful, then read the second one which says:

“ Our challenge is to harness the potential of information and communication technology to promote the development goals of the Millennium Declaration, namely the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger; achievement of universal primary education; promotion of gender equality and empowerment of women; reduction of child mortality; improvement of maternal health; to combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases; ensuring environmental sustainability; and development and agreed development goals, as contained in the Johannesburg Declaration and Plan of Implementation and the Monterrey consensus, and other outcomes of relevant United Nations Summits.”

The paragraph four of the Declaration reads: “We re-affirm, as an essential foundation of the Information Society, and as outlined in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; that this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. Communication is a fundamental social, process, a basic human need and the foundation of all social organization. It is central to the Information Society. Everyone everywhere should have the opportunity to participate and no one should be excluded from the benefits the Information Society offers…..”

I have deliberately quoted only three out over 18 paragraphs of the Geneva WSIS Declaration. In my opinion, the paragraphs quoted here are not romantic but dealing with real issues that are facing developing countries, especially African nations. Such issues include poverty, hunger, starvation and above all the dreadful killer disease HIV/AIDS and malaria.

The benefits that the ICT tools or applications can be employed to solve some of these seemingly insurmountable challenges facing Africa are beyond human imagination. The Ghanaian media must be self-motivated and play their stated role to place Ghana on this World Map of ICT.