IT expert, Jacob Kwaku Gyan
Ghanaian IT expert, Jacob Kwaku Gyan has urged the Government of Ghana to focus on helping Ghanaian-owned tech companies to advance in technology.
Gyan, who is also the Chief Executive Officer of Adroit 360, a tech company in Accra, indicated that with the advancement of technology across the world, Ghana should be planning to support local tech giants to create social media sites that Ghanaians and other people in the sub-Sahara can depend on for business and entertainment purposes.
He made this known when he was discussing the impact of social media on the lives of Ghanaians on Tonton Sansan on TV XYZ Friday morning.
He told host Kwame Minkah that, “now we have a digitalisation Ministry in the country; the Ministry of Communication does digitalization, so they should pay a particular focus on helping to advance technology in Ghana and support Ghanaian tech firms that have developed apps locally.”
He said the tech companies will need the support of the government before their apps can be used, stressing that “Asia has no WhatsApp but Wechat which is being supported by the governments in the continent.”
“I have built apps for some companies that are used for internal communications,” he said when asked whether some Ghanaians have the capacity to build powerful apps for communication which can be extended to every Ghanaian for usage.
He recalled his colleague at the University of Ghana built an app that was similar to Facebook, saying the country will be able to compete with the western world when such app builders are given the needed support by the government.
The entrepreneur’s comment comes on the back of an outage on social media sites Facebook and WhatsApp that lasted more than 5 hours. The services were down from about 16:00 GMT until around 22:00 on Monday.
Facebook blamed an internal technical issue that did not only affect Facebook’s services but WhatsApp.
Just as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg lost nearly USD 7 billion as Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp remained down for several hours, some Ghanaians who rely on the services for businesses also bemoaned the outage, triggering a conversation for Africa to get its own social media platforms.
Jacob Gyan believes the calls are not far-fetched since they can help boost the economy.