The Chairman of Ghana's National Information Technology Agency (NITA) said that the country's Internet penetration on the continent is no longer competitive. Nii Narku Quaynor made the statements on Wednesday, citing United Nations Secretary General's Multi Stakeholder Advisory Group on Internet Governance Forum. He argued that Ghana has lost the competitive urge as a result of policies that have moved away from focusing on the Internet and telecommunications, which has seen a number of Internet Service Providers close as a result. “We would imagine that that having to deal with convergence now amidst these policy misalignments is a real challenge,” Quaynor said when the Vice President of Ghana John Dramani Mahama launched the national ICT Policy Review Forum in Accra under the theme: “ICT – Towards Employment Creation.” Quaynor continued to say that as the world prepares for the next Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Kenya in the fall, “it was worthwhile to witness an attempt at a multi-stakeholder approach to Internet governance locally.” The themes of global IGF include diversity, openness, security, privacy and critical Internet resources, which he admitted Ghana was falling short on. He said NITA was hoping to establish a bottom-up policy development process that would engage the larger industry in developing the detail technical policies typically associated with IT standards and practices, which would inform a broader policy process on ICT. “Given a rather fast changing IT industry, policies would need to be reviewed more frequently than perhaps in other sectors,” he said and noted that in some cases, ICT policies had become outdated with the most often cited example in broadband access being those associated with VOIP polices and regulations. BM
