The
government of Ghana is currently working on to deploy ‘Big Data’ to rationalise
the collection, processing, storing and sharing of data among government
agencies.
This is
expected to be the next major jump in the journey to completely digitise the
Ghanaian economy.
According
to Minister of Communications and Digitalisation, Ursula Owusu-Ekuful, ‘Big
Data’ is expected to come with the needed data analytics platform which will
help make proper sense of all the data being mined across government.
It will also
help government track trends across the ecosystem, make projections based on
data modelling techniques that will be critical for decision making across the
spectrum.
Speaking at
the World Development Report by the World Bank, Mrs. Ursula-Ekuful said ‘Big
Data’ architecture also takes into consideration the data generated and stored
within the private sector to ensure that there is seamless sharing of data
across both private and public sectors.
She
explained further that the ‘Big Data’ regime is expected to bring transparency
and efficiency in the way data is utilized.
“The
built-in artificial intelligence component will ensure real time update of the
different models for different stakeholders. Government will then be able to
make policy decision based on data science and communicate effectively to
citizens who would have access to the same data. This should improve on the
trust relationship between government and citizenry”.
“One of the
most important outlooks of this initiative is the real and accurate information
to the business community from the staples of government. The business
community can make targeted investments in critical, high growth sectors of the
economy where return on investment is high to enable economic growth”, she
added.
Some identified
sectorial models for the Big Data programme include Big Data for Healthcare,
Big Data for Agriculture, and Big Data for Governance, Big Data for Trade and
Bid Data for Security. Other are Big Data for Education, Big Data for Finance,
big Data for Disaster Management and Big Data for recreation.
Sharing
of real time information is also expected to improve security across the
country as the security and intelligence agencies can target scarce resources
to where it is needed most based on timely and accurate data.
Ursula
Owusu-Ekuful said the partnership between development partners, civil societies
and government is expected to improve as there will be more reliable and
uniform data across all sectors of the economy readily available in the
governance process.
On the
commercial side, she pointed out government is looking to model a regulated
commercial framework around big data.
This will
encourage institutions, both private and public, to generate more data.
The
Data Exchange Hub: will
provide the infrastructure, protocols and framework for data sharing across
public and private sectors. It will provide the needed APIs to integrate with
critical government systems to provide data input in real time, the cost of
data (hits) and the use of the data that is accessed will be managed through
the data governance framework to minimise data abuse and privacy issues.
Data Governance Framework: The
Big Data initiatives is expected to be deployed with a data governance
framework which will define data value, data exchange protocols, security
channels and protocols, data governance hierarchy, data exchange dispute
resolution protocols, etc.
Rural Telephony Project for Connectivity: The
underlying infrastructure to ensure that government get more value out of this
data ecosystem it is building. GIFEC through the rural telephony project is
extending connectivity to the most rural part of the communities with shared
community base stations to allow all telco providers to be able to provide
services to the rural folks without the CAPEX overhead on the part of the telco
providers. This will facilitate access to the data ecosystem.
Ghana Card Integration for Identity of Persons and
Corporates: The ongoing integration of the Ghana Card as the
identity platform for persons across the ecosystem is part of the effort to
sanitise, standardise and share data across the ecosystem. The Ghana Card is
providing single identity services to persons whiles RGD is expected to provide
single identity to institutions and companies across the ecosystem to build
trust. This government believes will help in the standardisation of data across
all platforms.
Source:myjoyonline