The vice president of the World Bank Africa, Mr. Hafez Ghanem is in tears over the high cost of internet and its charges in developing countries, especially Ghana.
Mr. Hafez Ghanem made this observation when he paid a courtesy call on the Minister of Communications, Ursula Owusu-Ekuful, and urged her to adopt ways to bring the cost down.
Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI) in October 2018 released a survey that showed that more than 2.3 billion people live in countries where just 1GB of mobile data is not affordable.
In her response, Mrs. Owusu-Ekuful said the government of Ghana has already begun processes aimed at reducing the cost of the internet in the country.
She said there will be an industry forum early next month to force a consensus on the way forward.
Mrs. Owusu-Ekuful also stated a high level engagement with the regulator and the industry operators had been ongoing for some time now to promote greater infrastructure sharing and competition with the aim of forcing the internet cost to fall.
“There’s a huge appetite for data in this country which we are not being able to meet and so we see that there’s an opportunity, there’s a commercial opportunity for the private sector to also take advantage of.
“So we have begun having meetings around several issues including; sim registration, equipment identity registration among others to clean up that space and make it more secured and less easy for people to use their devices for formulating criminal activities. We are going to have an industry forum early next month to put all these conversations forward and force a consensus on the way to go,” she added.
Many internet users have complained about the high charges when it comes to using internet services in Ghana and we hope the call from the World Bank would at least get the communication ministry to do something about it.
