Minister of Communications, Edward Omane-Boamah, has revealed work has begun on a National Data Centre to serve public and private entities in the country.

The datacenter will facilitate the storage, management, and dissemination of data and information for both public and private establishments.

The project, which forms part of government's effort to improve Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure in the country will be completed by April 2015.

This datacentre, according to Dr Omane-Boamah, will comprise of a primary datacenter in Accra with over 500 rack space, expected to be the largest in West Africa.

"The Secondary Data Centre is located on KNUST Campus, Kumasi. The datacenter will provide services such as web hosting, cloud Infrastructure as a service solutions and dedicated servers to all interested stakeholders", Dr Omane-Boamah said.

The Minister revealed these at the at the 6th Young Professionals Transformational Leadership Conference and Role Model Awards held at Accra International Conference Centre on Wednesday, December 10, 2014.

Young Professionals Transformational Leadership Conference and Role Model Awards is an initiative of the Young Professionals and Youth Coalition (YPYC), a youth-oriented non-governmental organisationthat seeks to network, transform and engage the mindset of the youth in discussions of national affairs

The event also emphasises the importance of leadership and entrepreneurship to deliver national goals.

"The over 2 Pentabytes storage which will be available at these datacenters will usher the country into an era where more and more local companies and start-ups will create local content  to reduce the over reliance on imported  content as an import substitution strategy being pursued by Government in the ICT Sector", Dr Omane-Boamah said.

Already government has established a nationwide 4G LTE network that provides access to key government services to all regional and some district offices of MDAs and MMDAs, the Minister revealed.

"A 10 Gbps fiber ring inter-connect all government Ministries and the seat of Government in Accra.  With this, the issue of collaboration, cooperation, information sharing, that helps in information dissemination and collecting of feedback to facilitate decision making process is achieved faster electronically", the Minister said.

Recently, as part of the eGhana project, government established the National IT Agency to rollout a nationwide network to serve all government agencies with Internet access.

The project has also created a shared platform for all Ministries, Departments and Agencies to run applications from the current pilot datacenter.

Access the full text of Dr Omane-Boamah's speech at the event here.