Government has resolved to use profits from the monitoring of calls that are coming into the country to finance projects that will allow communities to access telecommunication services, the Minister of Communications, Haruna Iddrisu, has said.

The monitoring of international calls is being undertaken by Haitian-based Global Voices Group (GVG) under a Consolidated International Gateway project to ensure that the State does not lose monthly revenue of US$6 million due to the nefarious activities of criminals who are exploiting the lax controls in the telecom sector.

The Minister said this yesterday at the 5th Annual Connecting Rural Communities Conference in Accra.

The Conference is under the auspices of the UK-based Commonwealth Telecommunication Organisation, to chart a way to enable rural communities in Africa to have access to telecom services for the betterment of their standard of life.

Government has fixed a price of US$0.19 – an increase of US$0.07 – to be charged by all telecom companies in the country for the termination of all inbound calls through the installation of an Intelligence Signalling Management System.

Out of the US$0.19 call charges, the local operator that terminates the call gets US$0.8, the third party call monitor, GVG, gets US$0.6 and government gets US$0.5.

Mr. Iddrisu said the government is backing the Ghana Investment Fund for Electronic Communications (GIFEC) to improve the access telecom services.
“The government will in the course of the year provide funding from the proceeds of the Consolidated International Gateway project to enable the Ministry of Communications undertake more universal access projects in the communities across the country,” he said.

He praised telecom operators for dedicating one percent of their annual revenue to support the activities of GIFEC in funding projects that will connect rural communities to telecom services in the country.

The Chief Executive Officer of the Commonwealth Telecommunication Organisations, Dr. Ekow Spio-Garbrah, called on governments of the continent to recognise Public, Private and Peoples Partnership (PPPP) as one of the possible ways of solving the continent’s telecommunication networks challenges.

He said the success of projects intended to connect rural communities will depend on the profits that will be generated from the investment, planned public awareness programmes, local language content, building on national and regional networks, among others.

“We must see agro-based cooperatives, traditional rulers, religious bodies, commercial and rural banks, special funds such as GETFund and universal service funds like GIFEC as potential PPPP partners,” he said.

Dr. Spio-Garbrah added that the CTO will by the end of this year launch the Commonwealth Telecommunication Development Fund to support telecom infrastructure development and development of local content through national ICT incubator programmes.

By Evans Boah-Mensah

Source: BFT