2017 New Year School launched
The 68th New Year School and Conference, to be held from January 15 to January 20, 2017, on the theme, “Promoting National Development through Agricultural Modernisation: The Role of ICT,” has been launched.
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The school, organised by the School of Continuing and Distance Education is a platform for dispassionate discussion of issues of national and international concern.
Dean
In his address at the ceremony, the Dean of the School of Continuing and Distance Education, Prof. Michael Tagoe, underscored the need for the public to embrace Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in agriculture.
“This year, we think agriculture has been the major concern; the growth rate in the sector has been a great concern to a lot of Ghanaians and we decided to highlight that aspect of promoting national development through modernisation of agriculture, the role of ICT,” he noted.
He stated that ICT could be used to address some of the perennial challenges in the sector.
Prof. Tagoe explained that the reason the school chose agriculture and ICT was that there had been global attention recently on agricultural modernisation and the need for the deployment and utilisation of ICT in agriculture.
“Both the sustainable development goals emphasise the need for agriculture to be modernised to increase productivity and poverty reduction, as well as create jobs for the many young people who are currently unemployed.”
He noted that Ghana’s ICT for accelerated development was designed to aid the country’s developing process by contributing to addressing the nation’s key developmental challenges. However, it had been marginalised.
Prof. Tagoe said the vision of the policy was to improve the quality of life of the people of Ghana by significantly enriching the social, economic and cultural well-being through the rapid development and modernisation of the economy and society using ICT as the main engine for accelerated and sustainable economic and social development.
Technology
Prof. Tagoe recommended mobile phone penetration for every homestead in Ghana, especially those in rural areas.
He said the New Year School would identify issues that were of concern to ordinary Ghanaians. “We want to get to the farmers and we want to get through the associations. There are very good farmers who are already using ICT and we need to showcase these farmers.”
He also opposed the impression that most farmers were uneducated, adding that there were excelling farmers who used ICT.
Modernisation
The Deputy Minister for Agriculture, Dr Ahmed Yakubu Alhassan, said appreciated the efforts of the New Year School at contributing to the cultural modernisation of agriculture.
He said the ministry had a policy to allow ICT to inform their actions within the ministry, which included extension service delivery and exchange.