National Information Technology Agency (NITA), in collaboration with Mobile Web Ghana is having a four-day stakeholders meeting on Ghana Open Data Platform Project under the auspices of the Communication Ministry as a result of the digitization process government began in 2010.
The stakeholder meeting is ongoing at the Kofi Annan ICT Center.
It is to facilitate the upload of government data to the Ghana Open Data Portal and create an opportunity for civic technologists, statisticians, journalists, software developers and data scientists to develop data visualizations and innovation data applications for use by citizens and MMDAs communities.
The event also presents a Data Upload Challenge and Data Hackathon being put together specifically for government ministries, departments and agencies to upload data onto the open data portal and for the software developers, journalist, statisticians to interact with MMDAs.
Interestingly, government institutions that upload data onto the Ghana Open Data Portal in large quantities with accepted standards in the Data Upload Challenge win financial rewards of GHC 2000, 1500 or 1000.
With the Data Hackathon, the winners will receive an amount of GHC 15000 as prize money and will undergo a 2-month acceleration program at Mobile Web Ghana to have their software solution develop.
Speaking with Atinka news, Eric Akumiah, Data Expert working on the e-transform project with NITA, mentioned that in pushing the national digitization agenda, NITA was tasked to provide massive infrastructure across the country for access.
They were also to put in place the national data center and applications that can serve the citizens.
It further provides opportunity for the citizens to analyze and interrogate the MMDAs. The whole idea of Ghana’s Open Data came about in 2012.
However, in 2016, Government in order to revamp the open data project released US$ 900,000 and the project is almost coming to an end.
Eric Akumiah also hinted that one of the key components of the project is to create and facilitate a smooth sharing of data and information between government agencies and departments since that is a challenge.
“One agency one data from another is a big challenge…..it’s a tug of war, there is therefore a policy in place that addresses such issue as well. We have revamped the portal and it is efficient now”, he added.
And that they would expand their capacity building initiatives for MMDAs and increase the education on the Ghana Open Data Portal. The portal can be accessed by visiting www.data.gov.gh
Ghana | Atinkaonline.com | Patrick Ofoe Nudzi
