Govt To Make Kofi Annan ICT Centre Public Sector IT Finishing School
The Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT (GI-KACE) is set to be made the Information Technology (IT) finishing school for the public sector. The move is to ensure that IT practitioners in that sector attain minimum standards of proficiency in their jobs— as the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA) did for public administration.
Announcing the move during the inauguration of the governing board of the centre, Communications and Digitalisation Minister, Ursula Owusu-Ekuful, explained that due to the fast-growing global information technology (IT) sector, it is critical that every IT professional in the country’s civil and public service works to some minimum study set which will be carried through a collaboration between the National Information Technology Agency (NITA) and KACE.
As Ghana’s first Advanced Information Technology Institute, KACE has built the capacity of over 40,000 students in Ghana and other parts of the continent since its inception.
“These high-end skilled personnel churned out are contributing their quota to their respective nations and in various fields in the public and private sectors. This is attributable to the quality demonstrated in the centre’s rigorous hands-on curriculum, an experienced faculty, and the high-value Ghana’s industry places on the centre’s products,” she stated.
KACE, she further stated, stepped up the development of several IT and e-Government solutions to promote the integration of ICT in the operations of the public and civil services in the last few years—a show of its readiness to be the country’s IT finishing institution for the public sector.
The centre developed the e-Asset system for managing public assets from procurement to decommissioning, the e-leave app for light human resource management functions, and the cashless e-Invoicing platform for processing of non-tax revenue and receipts/payments. Others include e-Learning platforms, data and web portal for government agencies, a real-time information-sharing platform for SMEs and an election collation and reporting platform.
It also rolled out several digital skill-training programmes for the civil service, public services and the private sector to facilitate the integration of ICT in the operations of these sectors as a key component in Ghana’s Digitalisation Agenda.
“These achievements have gained government recognition with approvals from my ministry, the Public Services Commission and the Ministry of Finance to recruit additional staff to support the increasing activities of the centre,” she stated.