Vice President Mahamudu Bawumia has said experts had been tasked to a new Base Survey Map for the country.
This is to replace the outdated 1974 one which has resulted in an undesirable level of informality and lack of proper validation of land titles, he said.
“Your economy is really stunted because land is really the key to unlocking a lot of wealth out of any economy, so if our land is not in play, then we have a lot of dead capital buried in the ground; in most countries where land is well defined, you have the mortgage market operating very well”, Dr. Bawumia explained.
The Vice President was speaking at the 2018 Annual Ghana Geographers Association and Geography Teachers’ Association Conference at the University of Education, Winneba.
This year’s five-day conference has in attendance geography teachers from senior high schools from all the ten regions, geospatial experts, lecturers of geography and related areas from universities and other experts in geography from Ghana and other African countries.
Speaking on the theme: ‘Geography – The Missing Link in Ghana’s Development Agenda,’ the Vice President noted some of Ghana’s natural resources remain untapped because the appropriate policies have not been formulated through spatial and other geographical technology.
He has announced government’s Land Digitisation Policy which will start later this year will incorporate contemporary spatial innovations required to realize Ghana’s full natural resource potentials needed to boost the economy.
He said, “in the process of land digitization, we held a conference, and we brought in the geographers, planners and so on, and if we are going to do the land digitization, then there will have to be a new survey map for Ghana, so we have begun the process, and we hope the new base map will be done between November (2018) and January (2019)”.
Speaking on the relevance of geography to Ghana’s development agenda, the Vice-president said the nations development drive would suffer if geography is relegated to the background.
He observes, “a greater number of daily government businesses can be solved using a geography-based technology called geospatial technology; this means Ghana needs spatial thinkers, the real foot trails of geographers.”
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By: Joseph Ackon-Mensah/citinewsroom.com/Ghana