ICT AS A TOOL FOR DEVELOPMENT

Nations worldwide have recognised the development opportunities and the challenges of the emerging information age characterised by information and communication technologies (ICTs).  These technologies are driving national development efforts worldwide and a number of countries in both developed and developing world are exploring ways of facilitating their development process through the development, deployment and the exploitation of ICTs within their economies and societies.

This I think informed the government of Ghana to introduce ICT as a subject of study into Ghanaian education. The worry is the lack of infrastructure for this new and laudable program (ICT).
One gentleman told me at an ICT forum that my organisation Savana Signatures was wasting money in training teachers to better teach ICT because most of the teachers came from schools that are not connected to the national grid and that some of the few teachers in the training whose schools are connected do not have a single computer in their school.  For some time I did not know what to say, but advised the teachers present to work in collaboration with their PTA’s to help their schools develop.

On the other hand, it is important to recall that when the Ghana education service came out with the idea of making ICT examinable in Ghanaian schools, it received a lot of critics, but they still went ahead to make ICT examinable ignoring the sentiments expressed by parents and stakeholders in education and today as I speak, many innocent students would be left out of the computerised posting because they failed ICT. The question in the mind and guess in others' is “on what basis are the students being examined?”

What I have observed in Ghana is that, any time they are making policies either in education or health, the feasibility study is always conducted using endowed institutions especially in the nation’s capital and Kumasi forgetting that there are schools in villages that have never had a trained teacher posted there to teach. 
I want to encourage policy makers to look beyond the regional capitals any time they make decisions concerning the national development otherwise like the gentleman rightly said, NGOs like Savana Signatures would continue to waste money and resource in organising capacity building sessions for teachers and others only to go and keep it to themselves.