Ghana’s digital agenda has been given a $200 million boost by the World Bank.
The bank’s intervention will help expand access to broadband services across the country.
Among other things, the fund is to target selected digital public services, and strengthen the digital innovation ecosystem in Ghana to help create better jobs and economic opportunities.
Digital is one of Ghana’s best-performing sectors and grew on average by 19 percent per year between 2014 and 2020 and the country continues to be a leader in Sub-Saharan Africa although there are still some challenges that need to be address.
Building on previous investments, particularly through the ongoing World Bank-supported e-Transform Ghana project, this newly approved Ghana Digital Acceleration Project is supporting a regulatory shift to create an enabling environment for digital inclusion and innovation; streamline governance and delivery of public services; and facilitate smallholder engagement in data-driven digital agriculture.
“Expanding digital access and adoption, enhancing digital public service delivery, and promoting digitally enabled innovation are essential for Ghana’s digital transformation, which will help drive a robust post-COVID-19 recovery,” said Pierre Laporte, World Bank Country Director for Ghana, Liberia, and Sierra Leone.
“The Ghana Digital Acceleration Project covers all these elements and will help advance the whole-of-government digital transformation agenda to accelerate adoption of digital technologies and innovation by key productive sectors, such as agriculture, to foster an economy-wide digital transformation.”
The World Bank is confident that with the new support, the digital entrepreneurship ecosystem in Ghana will improve and survival of digital technology-enable startups who among other things are driving digital inclusion and providing other digital services that promote digital rights in the country.
The World Bank believes that the Ghana Digital Acceleration Project is expected to increase access to mobile internet and broadband services of 6 million people by encouraging private sector investment in last-mile connectivity in underserved rural areas.
It will also promote digital inclusion for women, persons with disabilities and rural communities through regulatory updates and investments among others. This will help to remove barriers to broadband and digital service access for Ghana’s lowest-income people and to close the regional digital gap.
“Public sector digitization under this operation will continue the e-Transform project’s digital public service delivery ongoing efforts, to help generate significant economic and development benefits for people, businesses and the government, such as increased efficiency gains and time savings for the society and the economy,” said Maria Claudia Pachon, Senior Digital Development Specialist of the World Bank and Task Leader of the project. “The digitization of government services will also result in significant cost savings due to decreased travel and processing time to obtain services, as well as transaction costs such as manual entry errors, fraud, and corruption,” the bank said.