MTN Ghana pledges continuous support for government’s digital economy goal
MTN Ghana has pledged its continuous support to government’s goal of creating a digital economy and becoming a digital hub in the West African sub-region especially on the back of the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA).
According to the telecom giant, the government’s goal of achieving a digital economy can only be achieved by investing and building adequate digital infrastructure.
“One of the things that will determine the countries or companies that perform well in the AfCFTA is technology, Ghana’s desire to be a digital economy is good, but to get there the country has to invest in infrastructure and ensure that it is well-positioned to be the technology center of Africa under the AfCFTA.
“And this is an important strategic objective for the country that we as MTN will continue to support,” remarked Selorm Adadevoh, Chief Executive Officer of MTN Ghana.
According to the CEO, the company is already in the process of submitting to the government a proposal on building ICT hubs and innovation cities for SMEs to drive innovation and help Ghana become more competitive under the AfCFTA.
“We are in the process of designing a proposal on how we can support the government in building ICT hubs and innovation cities where we bring all SMEs together into one area and ensure the development of small companies and drive innovation and use it as a platform for Ghana under the AfCFTA. All that we do is to help Ghana become more competitive in the AfCFTA,” he stated.
Additionally, the CEO announced some $207 million investment in building its digital infrastructure all as part of efforts to help the government achieve its digital economy objective.
The government, for the past few years, has embarked on an aggressive digitalization drive as it seeks to formalize the economy and increase revenues.
Government in its digitalization drive for instance has built the Ghana.gov platform, a fully-integrated payments processing and settlements platform that enables all Ministries, Departments, and Agencies (MDAs) and Metropolitan, Municipal, and District Assemblies (MMDAs) to provide services to the public, take and make payments on the digital platform.
The platform is intended to be a digital services and revenue collection platform for the public sector, created to provide a single point of access to Government of Ghana services.
A key rationale for creating the Ghana.GOV platform is to cure the inefficiencies in Government’s domestic revenue collection, which leads to huge revenue losses every year.
Government estimates that digitizing collections via the Ghana.GOV platform will enable it to improve revenue by some GHS 3 billion annually.
