Indigenous ICT firm, Alltel Technologies Limited is embarking on a 200 million dollar initiative that seeks to create some ten thousand entrepreneurial jobs over the next two years.

The project involves the creation of franchises and dealerships for distributing the company’s technology devices specially designed to meet the specific needs of locals businesses and individuals. They include computers, tablets and phones with localized applications and Wi-Fi connections.

The company is also considering establishing technology learning centers to deepen education in sectors such as health and agriculture through partnerships and franchising.

Executive Chairman Dr. Prince Kofi Kludjeson who is also a former President of the Association of Ghana Industries explains to Joy Business, the move is to complement government’s effort to leverage on ICT in the country’s economic growth.

“We want to do a very major collaboration with government because in all these things even in a developed world like Silicon Valley, there's always a major collaboration between educational institutions and government. That is, the educational institutions providing the support like what we have and government by way of policies.

“One of the things we want to do is to contribute to growth of the ICT sector so collaboration is one of the major things we're looking for, not financial support because we can create our own equity and funding for that. Ghana today has National Information Technology Agency, NITA, which is building a very good infrastructure. We can collaborate so that we can use some of these services to be able to provide service to the people at an affordable cost”

The Communication Minister; Dr. Edward Omane Boamah on Thursday, May 28 paid a working visit to the company to ascertain the progress of work on the multi-million dollar project.

Dr. Omane Boamah lauded the initiative and also outlined some government’s plans to broaden the ICT bas in the country.                                         

“A lot of things are happening in Ghana and this obviously is a manifestation of the fact that Ghanaians can do a lot in the Information Communication and Technology sector. Mr. Kludjesson is trying to bridge the digital divide. The National IT Agency has invested massively in infrastructure, LTE technology is being deployed, fibre is being deployed in the eastern part of the country. Submarine cables running into about 12.3 terabytes are also available. As we speak now several community information centres have been completed.

“This year we're constructing 21 more community information centers and so we have encouraged them to sit with the National IT Agency so that we can fashion out a public-private partnership to ensure a win-win situation for the youth of this country and also for the investors. Investors being government and the private sector,” he noted.