By Rebecca Ekpe
The 75th Annual New Year’s School and Conference is being held at the University of Ghana, with the theme ‘Caring for Resilience: Embracing Technology and Embracing Humanism for Sustainable Development’. The three-day conference, organized by the School of Continuing and Distance Education in collaboration with the Ministries of Transport and Digitization, Finance and Education provides a platform to engage partners in academia, media and civil society organizations in public and private sector. to study relevant issues affecting national development and suggest workable solutions to them.
Providing a platform to offer solutions that will shape public policies and promote good governance is the way to go as Vice President Dr. Bawumia reiterated at the New Year school launch that in this era of the fourth industrial revolution, digital technology is an enabler in enhancing productivity and revenue mobilization for sustainable development. As Ghana moves towards creating a more friendly digital ecosystem, it is important to highlight the need to make internet connectivity more accessible by making it affordable. This means that being able to buy data to stay connected and stay connected should be a priority. Available data reveals that much more young people are online than older people.
Clearly, there is a digital divide, which will also need to be bridged if Ghana is to jump on the bandwagon of using technology to propel the economy as envisioned. However, it is commendable that the University of Ghana has plans to build a Digital Youth Village to promote and enhance digital entrepreneurship among the Ghanaian youth. The Village, being built by the University of Ghana on a five-acre site, is expected to serve as a center of excellence for learning, innovation and creativity, with cutting-edge information and technologies. According to Vice President Bawumia, the Digital Youth Village will harness the potential of Ghanaian youth in information communication technology (ICT) for accelerated socio-economic development.
This is commendable considering the fact that appropriations have been made in the 2024 budget to complete Phaser one of the projects by the close of 2024. As well-intentioned as this project is, if it is not implemented according to plan and made for serve its intended purpose, it may end up as a white elephant and perhaps exacerbate the plight of the teeming youth in Ghana whose ambitions and aspirations lie in a digitally enabled ecosystem that will create jobs and propel the country’s economy to prevent them from fleeing their homeland in search of perhaps non-existent and ironically better conditions.
Once again to ensure that Ghana is able to cultivate resilience by adopting technology and embracing humanism for sustainable development, there is a need to create synergies between academia and industry. Foreign content must give way to Ghanaian content and above all the politicization of issues must give way to inclusiveness and grassroots representation because that would perhaps be the only way the New Year School would not be only an annual affair, but in reality, it would give real time answers and solutions to Ghana’s developmental deficits.
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