By Nana Appiah Acquaye, Accra, Ghana
The Ghana government, through the Ministry of Communications, is currently constructing what it believes will be the largest data centre within the West African sub region.
The 500 rack space national data centre infrastructure is expected to serve the public and private entities in the country will comprised a primary data centre in Accra adjacent to the Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT and opposite the Council of State Building. The secondary data centre is located in Kumasi.
According to the Minister of Communication, Dr. Edward Omane Boamah, two Pentabytes storage which will be available at these data centres, which will help usher the country into an era where more and more local companies and start-up will create local content.
Addressing a workshop organized by Global Information Technology Solutions in Accra, the Communication Minister said that his ministry at the moment is putting up a Grade ‘A’ Real Estate infrastructure for a Business Process Outsourcing Centre (BPO) with state-of-the-art telecommunications access facility which will provide leased out spaces for Business Process Outsourcing, software development, IT training and services, and other Information Technology Enabled Services (ITES) when completed to enhance ICT job creation.
It’s believed that with the completion of the centre, 10,000 direct and indirect jobs will be created to boost employment opportunities for the country’s young men and women.
With the acquisition of a 50 acre of land size by the government located at the Ghana Free Zone Board (GFZB) enclave in Tema a suburb of Accra for an ICT Park, the government of Ghana and the World Bank through the Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprise (MSME) Project under the Ministry of Trade and Industry commenced an integrated program in 2007 aimed to enhance the capacity of MSME’s to improve their operational efficiency, market share, job creation capabilities while contributing to shared growth and poverty reduction through supporting entrepreneurship development .
The business model of the ICT Park is a Public-Private Partnership (PPP), whereby GOG initiates the development but allows the private partners to drive it through leasing space to tenants.
This move according to Dr Omane Boamah is to position Ghana in a way that would make it a producer of software products one of the non-traditional exports.
