The first-ever excellence in Information Communication and Technology (ICT) awards is to be held on May 18, this year, as part of the Ghana at 50 celebrations. The programme to be hosted at a dinner dance by the Ministry of Communications in collaboration with private internet service providers forms part of a series of events dubbed: "Ghana @ 50 -The Future is ICT". Professor Mike Oquaye, Minister of Communications who launched the awards on Friday in Accra said the whole programme planned for the entire year would include a national round table meeting to discuss the theme; radio and television talk shows, exhibitions, documentaries and public lectures throughout the country as well as ICT awareness creation and educational programmes among. Prof. Oquaye noted that the excellence awards were instituted to support and create healthy competition in the ICT businesses in the immediate and long term. "The Ministry believes the introduction of these awards to recognise hard work and innovation would bring the desired competition in the ICT sector". The Minister said the government was moving at a dynamic pace which required all stakeholders to collaborate more effectively so that investment opportunities could accrue to benefit the private sector. He said government on its part initiated the ICT for Accelerated Development (ICT4AD) process in 2002, approved by Cabinet and Parliament in 2003 that set out Ghana' road map in terms of vision, missions, strategies and policy priorities for developing Ghana's information society. He said since the approval of ICT4AD policy statement, government has implemented a number of flagship ICT programmes in the area of e-education, e-government, community-based ICT initiatives and nation-wide ICT infrastructure roll-out, including the implementation of national fiber backbone initiative. Prof. Oquaye said there had been growth and expansion in ICT infrastructure development covering all the ten regions, which had enabled the telecom sector to collectively achieve tele-density growth of over 2000 per cent within a period of five years. "At the end of the year 2000, the total number of telephone subscribers in Ghana was 218,000. As at end of 2006, the number had risen to 5,428,000 subscribers representing 27.2 teledensity". He indicated that government, in addition to a concessionary loan facility of 30 million dollars already secured, was negotiating for an additional 70 million dollars from the government of China for the second phase of the national communications backbone infrastructure network to provide open access broadband connectivity nationwide. GNA