Government is working to ensure all its external data in other countries is hosted locally in Ghana.

This is to reduce the cost of operations and promote growth in the digital space.

Minister for Communications and Digitalisation, Ursula Owusu Ekuful made this disclosure to Joy Business after addressing a validation workshop on data centre and cloud regulations in Accra.

The validation workshop by Smart Africa and the National Information Technology Agency (NITA), is aimed at getting stakeholders' input for the enhanced regulatory framework for cloud and data centres in Ghana.

According to the Minister, this framework will lead to promoting the country to become the preferred choice for hosting African data.

She believes that hosting a localised data centre will support job creation in the digital space.

“We need to have the regulatory system in place to ensure that whatever achievements we have in the digital space are fully secured. So this is very important to us. It’s absolutely essential that we provide the legal framework within which emerging technologies will operate so they don’t grow like weeds”.

“One key thing that we want to promote with this is the localisation of the data in our country. We produce that data, it must be stored here. We don’t have anything against the Amazon Cloud Services and the big operators. Let them build data centres here and host Africa’s data on the continent because it is expensive and we’re paying twice to host the data on other cloud services, pay for the management and pay for retrieval for our use, it doesn’t make sense” she added.

The Director of Digital Infrastructure, Skills and Empowerment at Smart Africa, Thelma Efua Quaye, is optimistic that having a harmonised regulation system for data and cloud will boost investor confidence in the continent.

The government, she said, is therefore embarking on skills training for young entrepreneurs to take advantage of the growing digital space.