Mr. Emmanuel Ofori from the Ministry of Communication gave the welcome speech on behalf of Mr. Issah Yahaya, who is on a trip to the ITU conference in Geneva. Mr. Emmanuel Ofori recounted the first meeting and said this meeting was taking the South Node a step further in sharing diverse ideas on how we can develop using ICT tools available to us.

The first part of the meeting saw Mr. Alphonse K. Koblavie who is the leader of the team managing the government’s website started the discussions and hoped that his presentation will provoke a lot of discussion on the “Strategies for Institutionalizing ICT within the MDA’s”. He focused on the following objectives of the Ministry towards a well equipped MDA:

1. Identifying institution’s goals and objectives in the application of ICT,
2. Using ICT4AD Policy document as starting point,
3. Systematic Capacity Building in ICT for staff
4. Sponsorship drive for planned projects
5. Investing in the acquisition of IT equipment
6. Motivation for IT staff
7. Involvement of all Divisions in work of IT section
8. Influencing Management Decisions
9. Organisation of inter-ministerial fora/seminars on the use and importance of ICTs
10. Uniform and standard approach to the use of ICTs in the MDAs

After his presentation, the discussion centered on the activities of the Ministry of Communications in the regional and district levels and the difficulty of institutionalizing these arrangements in these levels. Mr Alphones Koblavie said that the UNDP has been very instrumental in working with Ministry of Information and Ministry of Local Government to achieve the above objectives. He said that through these initiatives, offices are now being networked, but warned that the Government must realize the importance of ICT, in order to fund it.

Mr. Emmanuel Ofori was also of the view that Government cannot fund ICT alone, but there are funds available from developmental partners, and once there is a comprehensive and practicable proposal, funds are released. He continued by saying the CICs is a model for expansion and will be established in all the 230 constituencies of the Country and asked the private sector to contribute to its success as well.

The District Library Project to be funded by the MP’s Common Fund was mentioned and ICT’s for education was also discussed. With the introduction of ICT in schools, it is important to establish infrastructure and a teaching strength that will impact learning and teaching. I am referring to the ICT policies; Mr. Emmanuel Ofori said that there should be ICT Training for Teachers’. Ministry of Education should embark on a “one laptop per child” project which is in a pilot phase now. “GINKS has institutionalized ICT and we must do all we can in our various organizations to support it”, he continued.

The second part of the meeting started with the participants giving updates from their Organizations.

Mr. Emmanuel Ofori of the Ministry of Communications started the updates by saying that Government has assisted the personal computer project, the CICs project and the national fibre backbone project. The 1st Phase of the backbone project is to see completion by the end of the year. The Ministry has been in touch with the Ministry of Education, Science and Sports, to discuss with the stadia contractor to see where they can set up nodes for Internet connectivity for the CAN 2008 African-cup of nations. 

H also talked about Scheme of Service. He said ICT jobs are highly paid jobs and there is high demand for ICT personnel. Government is investing much into Local area Networks and thus needs a pool of ICT personnel to realize their smooth implementation. To keep ICT personnel, we must set up a scheme of service for pay and carrier development. The government is now working with UNDP to develop a scheme of service especially in terms of Salaries and other incentives. This will make the work attractive to public sector ICT staff.

Lack of Electricity supply is the major problem that organizations in the rural areas are facing. A consistent electricity supply must be considered while ICT policies are drafted and implemented. Prince Deh of GINKS added that organizations should start budgeting and making arrangements for alternative power sources. Power is the key to institutionalizing ICT.

Mr. Samuel Bosomprah of Ministry of Health said that a lot of ICT activities are going on in the ministry. He said policy is ready, and the Ministry of Health is in the process of setting up an M&E plan that will go along with it. They are partnering with IICD for the implementation – The stakeholder collaboration is waiting for the Ministry of Communication to come up with their implementation plan.
 
Mr. Samuel Bosomprah continued and said a lot is going on, but most of them are going on uncoordinated. The Ministry has been trying to set up a module of operation for National Health Insurance Scheme, Reproductive and Child Health Programme without the availability of an implementation plan. The Ministry has realized the important role that ICT is playing in the healthcare delivery, and needs to overcome challenges as coordination and infrastructure.

A question on what the Ministry was doing on records management, Mr Samuel Bosomprah said records management is one of the biggest challenges of the Health Ministry. He said some of the HR personnel of the Ministry were not qualified and needed training to handle this. He said that these needs have been identified and the ministry is currently recruiting Higher National Diploma statistics graduates to be District Information Managers. University of Ghana, Legon will graduate their first set of Information managers and they will be deployed to these Districts. Also, once we can institutionalize Hospital Information System along with the statistics personnel, the problem of records management will be minimized.

Doreen D. Buobu of the Information Services Department talked about the following activities they undertook;

- They re-designed the portal. Managing it has been more complicated than the first one
- They are concentrating more on training staff both at regional and district level on the use of ICT tools. The staff trained now, will in turn train other staff.
-  IICD is sponsoring the setting up of a training center and this will ensure that training is in-house and reduces cost.
- It is expected that the project will network the whole building, but this will take off in 2008.

Mr Prince Deh also talked about the Web 2.0 and itself importance in enhancing the ICT4AD drive of the nation. Web 2.0 is real time and specifically targets the end user. It is very collaborative. He talked about Web 2.0 services such as blogging, podcasting, Wikis, Flickr, Video blogging and many more which is one of the initiatives of GINKS. He said this GINKS is doing through awareness and actually training people in the use of web 2.0 with a focus on network members. To this end, training sessions have been held on Web 2.0 and more will held in the future

Mr. Simon K Osei from the Ghana Agricultural Information Network Systems(GAINS) also enumerated the following activities;

- Went out collecting information to update data bases and abstracts are being processed.
- Ghana abstracts have been published. Editing of other science abstracts is in progress.
- Ghana Science journal - Current issues have been uploaded to the internet.
- Ghana Agric. Science journal have also been uploaded
-  The back issues are being worked on and will soon be on line. Challenges with the ISP, but they are working on it.
- Are doing indexing
- Have information on-line but needs updating.

Ms. Emefa Ansah of Global Teenager Project also took her turn to list the following updates from her institution’
- Infrastructural challenges are being worked on
- Getting refurbished computers for schools
- Local support still not encouraging
- The schools are beginning to gain interest and are taking up the projects on their own
- Hopes that CIC will work hard at establishing the internet in the local areas
- Have published their first newsletter
- Have come up with computer usage guideline
- Now have schools from five regions taking part in the learning circle. Moving to the North
- Was advised to Advocate to IICD for brand new computers.
- There are Health issues that come up with the use of refurbished PCs and so we should not be accepting refurbished computers.
- GTN will draw up proposal and present it to IICD.