CTO's confidence in Ce-G's research abilities from dealing with the NGO in the past, led to Ce-G's involvement in the Commonwealth Rural Connectivity Research - COMARCI. Ce-G was tasked to do research work on rural connectivity in Kenya, Cameroon, Nigeria, Ghana, The Gambia and Sierra Leone.

Ce-G's well-researched work was very well received by the CTO. The Final Report of PHASE ONE of the Project on COMARCI was launched in the UK on 19th June, 2008.

May 2008
On May 27 2008, the Ce-G in partnership with African Cancer Organization and Ghana Renewal Institute, organized a Human Resource Development public lecture on the topic: "HR Development as a Medium Term Growth for Ghana, An e-Agenda for Ghana with special focus on e-education and e-Health as e-Solutions."
The Main Speaker was the CEO of the CTO, Dr Ekwow Spio-Garbrah and it was ably chaired by the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ghana, Professor C.N.B Tagoe.
The first woman President of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, Dr. Letitia Obeng was our Introductory Speaker. This was a very well attended and enthusiastically received programme.

May 2008
In May 2008, Metro TV, a very popular TV Station, was approached by Ce-G for collaboration for a TV programme espousing ICT awareness. This, Ce-G believes, forms part of its advocacy objectives.
The idea was most welcomed by the TV station and currently, Ce-G is in the process of looking for sponsors for its pilot TV show coming out hopefully, before the end of 2008.

Johanna Awotwi is expected to present a paper at the 2nd ICEGOV2008 Conference in Cairo, Egypt at the end of the year.
The Ce-G would like to partner with any credible organization to provide travel grants to 2 of its members to attend this Cairo event.
Such assistance shall be most appreciated.

Mr. Frank Braimah and Johanna Awotwi were invited to a workshop by OSIWA on an e-Governance Academy for Africa.
This was held at the SUNLODGE Hotel in Accra during the month of April.

Ce-G prepared and sent in a Grant proposal in partnership with the Ghana Investment Fund for Telecommunications (GIFTEL) under OSIWA's e-Governance and ICT programme areas.

July 2008
July 2008, saw The Director of Research and ICT Operations visiting some Community Information Centres in Ashanti Region -middle belt of Ghana - to prepare an ICT Needs Assessment Report for the Ce-G.

July 2008
Ce-G collaborating with another NGO to do a study into the possibility of setting up an ICT Park in Cape Coast - an educational citadel in Ghana.

August-December, 2008

People

The following have been recruited by Ce-G as volunteer Research Officers and are currently doing research work on the impact of Community Information Centres (CiCs) in their operational areas, and also interviewing respondents on a pre-feasibility study for the setting up of an ICT Park in Cape Coast.

The latter is in collaboration with YAFOW, an NGO in Cape Coast and the CTO.

1. Abiba Tornia
2. Samuel Adzowu
3. Pearl Mary Nunofio

RESEARCH WORK

The following is a piece by Ce-G consultant Charles Amega-Selorm on eCare Centres; one of which is run by Ce-G.

eCare is a project which establishes telecommunication centers owned and operated by local entrepreneurs in rural and peri-urban areas of Ghana. The eCare centers run on solar energy and offer telecom and clean energy services to the people living in rural and peri-urban communities.

Over 70 centers are in successful operation in all the 10 regions of Ghana. The centers are benefiting more than 500,000 people in the affected communities.

These rural and peri-urban people benefiting from the project have access to affordable telecommunication services in areas where this was previously lacking. eCare is bridging not only the “digital divide”, “but also the energy divide”.

By the end of 2008 eCare will have at least 200 centers nationwide offering renewable energy powered telecom services to more than one million Ghanaians!

eCare

e-Commerce and Renewable Energy (eCare) is a development project that establishes Rural Business Centers owned  and operated by local entrepreneurs to promote increased  access to Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) enabled by renewable solar energy systems in rural and peri-urban communities of Ghana.

This means communities without electricity can also benefit from the eCare facilities which include Telephony services, computer access and training, renewable energy solutions, Internet access among others.

Background

Telecom Management Partner (TMP) and United Nations Foundation (UNF) initiated the eCare project in December 2003. UN Environment Program (UNEP) and a local NGO in Ghana, Kumasi Institute of Technology and Environment (KITE) were brought on board as implementing partners in eCare by UNF.

Ghana Telecom adopted the initiative into the company's Corporate Social Responsibility portfolio, GT Cares, in February 2005 after the initial design phase of eCare was completed. The project team comprises members from KITE and GT that holds the management of the project, and supported by UNEP in Paris.

Projects

The design phase of the project led to an enterprise model in which renewable energy-enabled ICT centers are to be established in rural and peri-urban areas. The pilot project established three of these eCare Rural Business Centers in Sogakope (Volta) Nkurakan (Eastern) and Sege (Greater Accra) respectively and was launched on June 7, 2005.

The main phase commenced in September 2005 and launched on December 14, 2005 at Mpeseduadze a village in the Central Region of Ghana.

UN Foundation provided funding to establish an eCare Fund that provides loans to eCare entrepreneurs. Loans to the entrepreneurs cover the capital expenditure (CAPEX) of their eCare Business Centers, which they own and operate. Components

Each eCare Rural Business centre consists of a modified and furnished shipping container, equipped with telephones, multimedia computers, printers, scanners, copiers, internet fax, and a complete solar system for mainstream and backup power.

eCare and ICT

eCare is accelerating access to Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in deprived communities of Ghana by establishing rural and peri-urban Community Business Centers (eCare Centers) telephones, fully multimedia computers, printers, scanners, copiers, internet, fax and solar installations to offer telephony and other value added services.

The eCare Centers are set up in areas where GT has GSM or Wireless Local Loop (WLL) coverage and are being expanded accordingly.

Ownership

Local entrepreneurs are identified, screened, recruited trained to own and operate these eCare businesses. The Project team provides training, support and technical assistance for the operators to develop additional value added services such as product sales, computer courses, secretarial and clean energy services for local residents and surrounding communities.

Evolution

A minimum number of 200 eCare Business Centers will be established under the eCare Project to offer tailored contents including agriculture, health and education in the communities of operation. Internet and other data services will be offered in addition to voice telephony by December 2008.

Additional funding is being sought for the eCare Investment Facility to support the establishment of more centers and content provision.

Benefits

eCare enables the local communities to have access to communication facilities like the telephone, fax, email and Internet for information sharing and knowledge development. It offers employment to others and generates revenue for entrepreneurs by selling airtime, GT products and services, renewable energy solutions, business services like word processing, computer training among others.

eCare Entrepreneurs

After successfully completing an interview followed by eCare training in Accra, you may be given the opportunity to apply for a loan to purchase your own eCare Center. The pre-packaged center will come to your village/town by truck in the shape of a modified shipping container with doors, windows, phone booths, a desk and ceiling fan.

Three Fixed Cellular Terminal phones, a solar system and a computer with a printer are also a part of the pre-packaged center which will be transported to an approved eCare site in a rural area. Approved eCare sites are found in rural/peri-urban areas with Ghana Telecom GSM coverage or Ghana Telecom Wireless Local Loop coverage.

Seeing that all centers will be supplied with solar systems, it will prove a competitive advantage for eCare sites in areas with no or poor grid power availability.

The basic criteria to become an eCare entrepreneur as follows;

• be a Ghanaian citizen.
• be above the age of 20.
• completed senior secondary school (SSS) or have experience equivalent to SSS
• basic computer knowledge
• creative, hard-working and entrepreneurial person.
• suitable site for an eCare Center
• prepared to run the eCare Center as a full-time business
• provide seed money/equity to the cost of a center and manage to repay a loan given to you through eCare

The bare plot near the Centre will be turned into a Computer Training School in the near future, since the inhabitants of Abokobi are mostly e- illiterates.

When the Training School idea is successful, it shall be replicated in other parts of the country.

UPDATES

1. The ICT TV Programme suggested by Ce-G to Metro TV will take off this year since the year 2008 was an election year and so most programmes were reserved for campaigning.



2. The Civil Society Resource Centre of the UNDP Country Office in Ghana came through to support Ms. Awotwi on her travel to Egypt to present a paper at the 2nd International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance. She also made a brief presentation on operations of Ghana’s e-Government benchmark, which is the GCNet or automized customs clearing software and how beneficial it has been to the government in its revenue collection.

   ICEGOV2008 benefited from invited talks by 3 distinguished experts and practitioners including His Excellency Dr. Ahmed M. Darwish, Minister of State for Administrative Development, Government of Egypt – from the government perspective; Professor Roland Traunmuller, Professor Emeritus, Johannes Kepler University Linz Austria spoke from the academic perspective and the international perspective invited talk was by Dr. Mario Apostolov, Regional Advisor, UN Commission for Europe. The talks took place on 2, 3 and 4 December, 2008 respectively.

   Featured were 15 invited sessions by various governments, universities and international organizations active in the area.

   The 6 government organizations were from Egypt, Macao S.A.R China, Nigeria, Ecuador, Kyrgyz Republic and Afghanistan.

   Three universities made contributions and they were Centre for Technology in Government, University at Albany, State University of New York, USA; Observatorio de Sociedad, Gobierno y Technologias de Informacion, Universidad Externado de Columbia, Columbia and the Information and Communications University, Korea.

   The 6 international and UN organizations included; GTZ GmbH, Germany, Microsoft Corporation; UN Governance Center, Korea; UN University; UN Economic Commission for Europe; and UN Institute for Training and Research. These sessions took place on 2 and 3 December, 2008.

   Additionally, there was a strong capacity building program comprising a series of 6 (horizontal) tutorials on domain independent aspects of Electronic Governance, held on December 1, which gave the audience the general foundation and understanding of the area. The series was accompanied by 6 corresponding workshops, held on December 4, 2008 to present state-of-the art research and applications.

   The 3 (vertical) tutorials on domain – specific aspects took place on 2 and 3 December. The topics were on Theory, Technology, Information, Transformation, Value, Policy, Education, Environment and Transfer. The capacity building program also included 8 panel discussions on Post – Conflict Countries; Implementation Frameworks; Interoperability Frameworks; Rural Communities, Environmental Governance; Dispute Resolution; Electronic Governance in Europe, and Citizen Journalism. These panels took place between 1-3 December.

   Regular paper sessions were held on 2 and 3 December and they covered a range of topics: Open Source, Sourcing and Networks, Development and Challenges in Practice, e-Voting, Electronic Governance in Practice, Software as Service and Business Process Reengineering, Organization and Implementation, Participation and Web 2.0, Infrastructure, Web Evaluation and Impact, Readiness, Innovation , and Policy Making.

   For more information on ICEGOV 2008, Please visit http://www.icegov2008.icegov.org/

3. By the end of the year, Ce-G had a few research proposals for funding, on connecting parliamentarians to their constituents through ICTs; tracking beneficiaries of rural bank loans with Role Based-Access Control software, and the impact of Community Information Centres on their beneficiaries in the operational areas.

4. The NGO continues to identify areas that are out of the loop for universal service and access, for advocacy purposes.

5. On the NGO’s plate for 2009, is a workshop on e-Governance in conjunction with the UNU and other international partners.