GIFEC rolls out three technological interventions
The Ghana Investment Fund for Electronic Communication (GIFEC), is collaborating with a number of public institutions to outdoor ICT interventions to better facilitate effective communication in critical areas of Ghanaian lives.
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The interventions: 112 Emergency Number, Prison Locator, and TETRA (communication system), are at various stages of completion and in some cases, are only awaiting budgetary approval and field tests.
When implemented, GIFEC expects to see practical and visible improvements in the way things are done in the area of critical resource deployment and emergency response, all in furtherance of the objectives setting up the Fund.
GIFEC aims primarily to bridge the digital divide between rural and urban communities and its Administrator, Kwabena Owusu Akyeampong is excited at the prospects of the available tools, saying the easy to operate solutions hold so much promise for improving the quality of life.
TETRA communications system
In an interview with Graphic Online, Kobby Akyeampong explained that the TETRA for instance, which has gained wide global use, is deployed in emergency and mission critical situations and its use the world over, has been motivated by public safety purposes.
“It’s been on the cards since 1996 but it never came to fruition and I think that it’s time that we moved it to fruition and therefore, I’ve proposed that we do a feasibility on its implementation in the coming year as part of our budgetary allocation and use it basically to help the security services,” he explained.
Prisons, Fire, Immigrations and Police services, Ghana Armed Forces, National Security and the National Disaster Management Organisation (NADMO), can all engage in intra and inter connectivity on the system.
“That system is scalable in the sense that you could have another system but you could put it on it and it will still work. It is end-to-end communication but it is also end-to-end-to-many. You can communicate with all agencies at the same time, and where an agency doesn’t need it, it can be partitioned, (so Prisons can speak to only Prisons officers, Police can speak to Police, Immigration can speak to Immigration) but where there is need for them to speak together, that is also possible.”
Another good thing about the TETRA is its accommodation for repeater stations – and so requires very minimal set-up from one end to the other, as against heavy infrastructural set-up. Its versatility dwells in its encrypted security and seamless communications for both voice and data configurations.
“What is informing this move is that a lot of the agencies have requested - they sent letters requesting for that kind of equipment, that kind of secure way of communicating and we feel that as the agency with that responsibility, we are obliged to meet that kind of (request).
Mr. Kobby Akyeampong, GIFEC Administrator
Prison Inmate Locator
The Prison Inmate Locator is an exhaustive register to help locate persons in incarceration and also monitor the status of their cases and other related information. It targets particularly persons on remand so as to reduce the growing cases of remand suspects being abandoned in cells as though they were convicts.
According to Kobby Akyeampong, so pervasive are the remand cases that the Chief Justice has had to set-up a Remand Court just so the Judicial Service can cope with the growing numbers. With the register, persons on remand will no longer get lost or their cases abandoned in the system as a result of poor accountability.
“We think that with the Prison Inmate Locator system in place, that basically captures all the information of a prisoner in a relational database, with the click of a button we can find out where Prisoner A was sent, the time he was incarcerated, whether he is on remand, whether his court date was due. All these things are meant to reduce the remand cases in the country, because if the Chief Justice had to set up a court to just deal with remand cases, then it means it’s a major problem and one sure way of dealing with that is to put in a locator system so that from the day you are sent to court on any issue, your data is captured, where you are sent is captured , when you are due for court is captured, it goes between the High Court and the police, to the prisons…,” and other bodies that must have some information on you, he explained.
Such information should also be available to the public so relatives can make the critical intervention in instances of health needs.
112 Emergency Number
GIFEC has already opened a call centre in Accra (Ghana House) and is readying to open a second in the Ashanti region (Nkwantakese), with a third centre planned for Tamale to serve as an emergency response centre where members of the public can dial the 112 Emergency Number to report any issue that requires immediate attention.
The centres have trained staff to receive the complaints and direct same to the appropriate institutions for quick redress.