The National Information Technology Agency (NITA) on Tuesday organised a workshop for staff of the Ghana Audit Service in Accra to upgrade their knowledge on the operations of the e-Government initiatives under the e-Ghana project. The project will deploy portal infrastructure to provide a platform for content management, document management, workflow and e-Forms, service integration and information and application security for government agencies. It was designed to computerise the entire Government system, by extending network connectivity of the National ICT backbone Infrastructure to all districts and provide a National Data Centre to manage its operations remotely from a central point. The application is being developed for deployment related to e-Payment, e-Procurement, e-Immigration, e-Parliament and e-Justice, e-Health, e-Education and e-Environment. Dr Kwame Boakye, a Lecturer at the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA) who introduced the e-Governance project to the participants said NITA started as a pilot phase of the e-Service project last year with the Driver and Vehicle License Authority (DVLA), Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Regional Integration, Passport Office National Identification Authority and the Mineral’s Commission. “The others are the Births and Deaths Registry (BDR), Criminal Investigation Department (CID) of the Ghana Police Service, Food and Drugs Authority (FDA), Ghana Tourism Authority (GTA), National Communications Authority and Accra Metropolitan Assembly.” He said the pilot project allows clients of the Passport Office to submit their personal data for application of passports online, and food product importers to register online with the FDA. It will also provide opportunity for BDR to administer and respond to birth certified copy requests from the public, AMA to register marriages and acquisition of marriage licenses. The GTA can also register accommodation and catering establishments. “It also allows the DVLA to introduce online driver’s license renewal application and vehicle ownership transfer services, the CID to do nominal vetting of applications for non-residents and criminal check of finger print vetting for local citizens including appointments. “It gives opportunity to users of Minerals Commission’s services to apply for prospecting/ reconnaissance license and also for a land Cartographic search. Mr Tony Bediako said the e-services portal platform would be hosted by a National Data Centre, which would be deployed over the Government’s wide Area Network by NITA. He said this would serve as a centralised storeroom, management and dissemination of Government data and also provide a common platform for the Ministries, Departments and Agencies, Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies and other public organisations.