Challenges of the Information Officer of the Digital Age

Digital Government

By Mawutodzi K. Abissath

My beloved brothers and sisters in information and communication industry in Ghana, verily, verily, I say unto you that the World Wide Web (www) with its offspring, the Internet, brought about by the Information and Communication Technology (ICT), is very, very useful indeed! If it weren’t so, I wouldn’t have told you so. But it all depends on how you use its tools to advance your course.

When doing a research to write this feature, I browsed the web and used the Google search engine to look up the definition of the three key words in the headline above namely, “challenge”, “information” and “digital.” I was amazed at the thousand and one shades of meaning available on the net. Yet, for purposes of this article, I just picked the basic meanings that best suit my intention. And that intention was to try as much as possible to write on technical subjects without much indulging in technical jargons, so that ordinary readers can enjoy reading the piece and understand the real issue at stake.

Thus, Challenge was defined as “a situation or difficulty that tests one’s ability to do something.” Information - “a collection of related data; knowledge about a topic; data that have been processed into a format that is understandable by intended audience.” Digital – “generally, information is expressed, stored and transmitted by either analog or digital means. In a digital form, this information is seen in a binary state as either a one or a zero, a plus or a minus. The computer uses digital technology for most actions.”

Analogically, let’s say that, as an Information Officer of the digital age, it was possible for me to obtain the meanings of these words on the Internet while using the computer. Otherwise, I would have been obliged to look for a big dictionary, which might not be available for me at the time of writing. The challenge that would have confronted me would have been my inability to obtain these definitions on the Internet instantly if I had not acquired some basic knowledge or the technique of utilising the tools of ICT to search online or the web.

In Ghana, Information Officers, like any other professionals, have been contributing their quota to the development of the nation from time immemorial. They have been discharging their duties by disseminating government information to the people. They do this by interpreting government policies and explaining less understood or misunderstood issues to the people at the grassroots. They, in turn, send feedback to government by informing the authorities about the sentiments, views, opinions the real feelings of the people on such policies or programmes for necessary reviews or modifications in the best interest of the governed.

For example, the implementation of national policies such as the National Health Insurance Scheme, the Capitation Grant, the School Feeding Programme, the National Youth Employment Programme, the Cedi Redenomination Programme, the Education Reform, the Regenerative Health and Nutrition Programme, the Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty, the National Identification Programme, just to mention a few, are issues that Information Officers have been supporting other Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) as well as other public and private organisations to educate the public about their value to society without playing politics with them at all. And where the desired impacts are lacking they have the responsibility to alert Government. Information Officers are professional civil servants who are mandated to play this role to assist any government in power for the prosperity of the nation.

Each year when the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning presents the national budget to Parliament, especially where new policy statements are made in the budget, all Regional and District Information Officers are convened in Accra for orientation. Experts from the Finance Ministry are invited to educate and explain policy issues to these Information Officers to enable them to understand and be well informed themselves first before they go back to their various districts to interpret the policies to ordinary citizens in their own local languages.

The latest policy issue, for instance, was the Communication Service Tax, popularly known as “Talk Tax.” Again, when the Bank of Ghana (BoG) came up with the Redenomination of the Cedi programme last year, this orientation was organised for Information Officers, who in turn, went to every corner of the country to explain the programme to the people at the grassroots, in addition to radio and television publicity embarked upon the BoG. This was how the Cedi Redenomination public education campaign was very, very effective and successful nation wide.

One principal and traditional means by which Information Officers have been discharging these functions in deprived and rural communities in the country was the use of the famous Information Cinema Vans. Today with the availability of over 130 FM Radio stations and appreciable number of television stations in the Ghana, Information Officers have access to other communication channels to complement the use of Cinema Vans. Again, Information Officers have the opportunity to diversify the use of Cinema Vans by producing video films, DVD and CD documentaries to supplement their traditional means of disseminating public information to the citizenry.

Now, with the Digital Age, ushered in by ICT, which has transformed the globe into a miniature community, and changed the way things are done from archeology to zoology, Information Officers, too, have new challenges to encounter. As Digital Information Officers now, therefore, there is no way they can discharge their duties effectively and efficiently if they do not acquire some basic knowledge and skills in the application of ICT tools. They need to know something about E-Government strategy. In this context e-Government simply means electronic government or government online.

About 20 years ago or so, the United Nations called on governments the world over to reengineer governance by adopting e-government strategies so as to provide public services to their citizens online. Singapore which was one of the countries in the world to adhear to the UN’s call quickly coined a slogan: “Any service that can be provided electronically must be provided electronically.” Little wonder by 2004, when UN conducted a global survey to ascertain which countries were providing effective public services to their citizens online, Singapore was second only to Canada. In fact, Canada was first in e-government strategy with Singapore and US sharing the second position before others followed, according to that survey. The question is how Singapore, a very tiny island with a population of less than six million with no natural resources whatsoever, share a position with the all might America in e-government strategy? Whether we like it or not, Singapore is a world superpower in ICT. Period!

E-government has objective and scope. Digital Information Officers need to know some of the basic e-government terminologies such as Government-to-Citizen (G2C), Government-to-Business (G2B), Government-to-Employees (G2E) and Government-to-Government (G2G) etc, so that when they are disseminating government information electronically, they will know exactly what they are about.

Even though the digital gap between Ghana and Singapore may take some generations to bridge, it is gratifying to note that the Government of Ghana has also heeded the UN injunction for adoption of e-government strategy to provide public services to its citizens online. One of measures the Government adopted to this end was the establishment of the Government of Ghana Portal www.ghana.gov.gh which is being managed by the Ministry of Information and National Orientation since 2003.

At the moment the Portal provides information on all sectors of the economy online. It also publishes major development oriented news on daily basis. It is yet to provide public services online. This has to be done in collaboration with some public services providers. Measures are being put in place for online services delivery on the Portal professionally. One particular development partner which supported the Information Ministry in the establishment of the Ghana Portal under what was known as Ghana Dot.Gov Project was the International Institute for Communication Development (IICD), based in the Netherlands.

It is commendable to observe since 2003, the IICD has maintained its technical and financial support to the Ministry of Information in terms of capacity building in ICT for staff of the Ministry and provisions of some equipment such as computers for the management of the Ghana Portal. Having realised that it is only when Information Officers are trained in ICT that they can cope with the demands of the digital age, the IICD has accepted a proposal to help the Ministry to establish an ICT Training Centre within the Ministry to provide constant training and technological upgrading for staff of the Ministry, the Information Services Department and as well as other MDAs in the country.

At the time of writing this piece, work has started on the ICT Training Centre project. UNDP has also been collaborating with the Information Ministry in the capacity building in ICT as reported in a previous article titled: “Ghana’s Community Information Centres (CICs) Project on Course,” published in the Daily of May 29, 2008. IICD is also supporting the CICs project in some rural communities in Northern Ghana.

Ghana Government itself has embarked upon other far reaching e-government projects to make the provision of public services to citizens online a reality in the country. For instance, there is a major E-Ghana Project with the support of the World Bank being undertaken by the Ministry of Communications to transform the whole nation into an e-society. Within the framework of this project, a National Optic Fibre Backbone was needed as infrastructure development leading to achieving that goal. In fact, Ghana’s Ministry of Communications has already completed the first phase of the National Backbone project.

The Ghana Information and Communication Technology Directorate (GICTeD), which is responsible for the e-government component of the E-Ghana Project, is feverishly linking up with other MDAs to ensure the delivery of the following national tasks for the country to be classified among e-government nations of the world: 1. Establishment of Internet registry for Ghana; 2. Establishment of Digital Signature Registry; 3. Establishment of Certified Electronic Mail System for MDAs and 4.Establishment of Electronic Document Workflow System for Ghana. These entire digital infrastructures must be in place to enable the Information Officer to meet the challenges of the digital age squarely.