KOFI ANOKYE OWUSU-DARKO (BLOG 1)

INTRODUCTION E-government may mean different things to different countries depending on their level of economic development and therefore different lenses being used in assessing the effective and efficient use of ICT in delivering government business. A country that has an already developed ICT infrastructure and computerised government back office processes will have a different view about e-government that may be more service delivery bias to a country running a manual government back office which will be more oriented towards automation of the back office processes. The definitions of e-government can therefore be said to be within a continuum of automation of government internal business to an external interaction with its citizens. This has broadly been re-categorised by Timothy Waema Professor, School of Computing and Informatics, University of   Nairobi, Kenya) into e-administration, e-services and e-society and in practice it may be possible for different government bodie...

Introduction In Ghana, biometric is currently being used in the workplace for access control to sensitive areas, financial e-transactions such as the e-zwich (charge cards) and by the government for passports, national ID and hopefully to be deployed in e-voting. This article intends to look at the dangers of holding such biometric database and then bring to fore what we may have to do to protect the Ghanaian as a data subject. As much as possible this article will be limited to provoking some of the legal implications for reflection. Biometric databases generally refer to storing digitized templates of biological information unique to an individual such as retina or iris, fingerprints, voice prints, and of face geometry which is matched with what is produced when a person physically presents herself at a reader.   There are basically two ways of storing such digitized templates, on a card which is under the control of owner (data subject) and centralized which is under the control...

INTRODUCTION It is generally acknowledged that information flow between government and its citizens does not only empower the people but promotes a “vigorous and robust democracy”. A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) except under certain exemptions is therefore intended to give the public the “right to know” the type of information held by public bodies. It is an attempt for “greater transparency, accountability and engagement” in government business and can create a culture of openness. Passing of the Act in Ghana is in my opinion a necessary but not sufficient condition to achieving the envisaged and most anticipated impact on our democracy. Having the Act is not an end itself but a good means to a desired goal. There are a lot of costly implementation issues by way of structures, systems, change of mental models that have to be put in place to operationalise the Act. The UK for example passed their FOIA into law in 2000 but came into force in 2005. I intend to highlight a few bene...