Business
While Economists Waver, Technology Entrepreneurs on the Rise in Ghana
Data center delays
Elsewhere in the cabinet, communications minister Edward Omane Boamah has settled into the position he took up in January 2013 when he replaced Idrissu. Omane Boamah has been overseeing the completion of the $30 million national data center, which will handle all of the government’s data and eventually also house the communications ministry.
Political insiders tell The Africa Report that the minister is fighting delays to finishing the center, which is now expected to reach completion in the first quarter of 2014. It marks an important move to centralize digital information. The ministry is also working on the second phase of establishing community information centers across the country, with a particular emphasis in providing educational resources to communities in the northern regions.
Capitalizing on the technology revolu- tion is young entrepreneur Derrydean Dadzie. Dadzie is the 31-year-old founder of DreamOval, a consultancy and software solutions company whose clients include Ghana Commercial Bank. Having founded the company at just 24, Dadzie is also working on establishing Dreamville, a proposed research and training site for budding technologists.
He is just one of a growing number of young people working with technology in Ghana. BloggingGhana, a group of 100 or so bloggers, launched a crowd-sourcing campaign to fund the country’s first physical social media hub in January. During the 2012 elections, the organization led the Ghana Decides project to inform the electorate before and after the vote. The group’s newest project is Inform Ghana, a platform that enables the sharing of information on health, education, governance and education to encourage interaction between members of the public and civil society groups.
