Two young women who have blazed the trail in developing and offering ICT solutions in Ghana have appealed to the government to set up a proper fund to support ICT start ups in the country. The two women are Sheila Penelope Bartels-Sam, CEO of Incharge Global Limited, and Anne Amuzu, CEO of Nandimobile.com. Sheila Bartels-Sam noted that Ghana was rife with young ICT programmers with the potential to develop relevant solutions to the numerous challenges facing both public and private institutions in the country, but the major problem facing such young people was lack of funding. “I am aware government has some multimedia incubator of a sort but most of my colleagues who went into that programme say there is not much of any help there so I think government should establish a proper all inclusive ICT incubator like in other countries where young ICT programmers do not have to worry about start up funding,” Anne Amuzu said. The two were speaking in separate exclusive interviews with Adom News Editor Nii Narku Dowuona in commemoration of this year’s World Telecoms and Information Society Day, which fall today, May 17, 2012, and focuses on women and girls. The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and the UN General Assembly set the day aside to mark the establishment of the ITU, signing of the first International Telegraph Convention in 1865, and to focus on the importance of ICT and a wide range of issues related to the information society. The theme for this year’s celebration is “Women and Girls in ICT”, and Adom News sought to throw the spotlight on the two young women who were among many other women making an impact on the Ghanaian society with their ICT solutions. Sheila Bartels-Sam founded and runs Incharge Global which develops e-payment solutions for at least 15 corporate organizations, including banks, telecom operators, oil marketing companies (OMCs), restaurants, major entertainment events like Ghana Music Awards, and Adom FM’s Ghana Gospel Industry Awards among others. Sheila said the e-payment solutions from Incharge Global come in the form of swipe cards, which could work as gifts cards for shopping, for the purchase of e-tickets for events, for fuel purchase, for musicians to get paid in real time when their music is downloaded online, and very soon for people to be able to buy mobile phone credit on a particular network. She said the company is developing a special swipe card for one of the telcos (name withheld) that would be used to buy phone credit as well as shop for other products. “We also develop ATM (automated teller machine) cards for at least six banks, two of which fully depend on us for all their ATM cards, but the remaining four use us as backup just in case their in-house fail of run out of material,” she said. Her first customer was Goil (Ghana Oil), and she developed the swipe card on which staff could load money to purchase fuel and also have the opportunity of reloading the card any time they run out, unlike other cards that are programmed to be loaded at specific periods only. Sheila Bartels-Sam said there is a great future for the ICT industry in Ghana to the extent that the youth are interested in ICT solutions and a lot of young people are also getting into programming, adding that the challenge, however was lack of funding, “and that is where I believe the state can come in.” She also urged the young ICT wizards to collaborate with each other to establish start ups, saying that “no one is going to give you money for startups so you need to collaborate and make things happen for yourselves,” she said. Sheila has no background in ICT whatsoever, but she said of herself “after my A-level at Swedru Secondary School left for the US and worked in a lot of sectors and ended up establishing a travel agency – that was where I realized that there were no e-payment systems in Ghana for people to pay me for tickets and hotel reservations electronically.” Sheila said when she returned to Ghana she made it a point to provide a solution to that e-payment challenge and the result was Incharge Global, which started in 2010. “I am aware the ICT demands a lot of concentration and tend to make practitioners rather anti-social but at Incharge we are having fun creating great solutions for our clients,” she said.