Communications and Digitalisation Minister, Ursula Owusu-Ekuful
• Tech developers in Ghana have been urged to develop new apps for communication
• The call comes following the global outage of three social media app
• Ursula Owusu-Ekuful believes this would stimulate the tech ecosystem
Ghanaian youth in the technology space have been urged to develop new apps for communication to serve users in the country and Africa at large.
This is the call by Communications Minister Ursula Owusu-Ekuful following the global outage of social media giants, Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram on Monday, October 4, 2021.
Reacting to the development, Ursula Owusu-Ekuful said stakeholders in the tech space must take advantage of the recent happenings to design local social media apps that can be globally competitive.
“I’m all for government using its purchasing power to stimulate the tech ecosystem. We’ve demonstrated that by procuring the National ID system from a local company. The digital address system and the Ghana.gov payment platform were developed by a local company. Our SIM registration platform was developed by a local company on existing infrastructure that we already have,” she explained in an interaction with Citi Business News.
She added, “So if our young people are able to utilize technology to address challenges that we face and come up with solutions, I don’t see why yesterday’s incident can’t also be an opportunity for them to innovate and develop something that we can use, if not as our main source of communication, as our alternative source that overtime can also grow to rival these global giants.”
On Monday, three social media giants, Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram experienced global outages for six hours with users unable to access their accounts.
The outage left many users and businesses in disarray as they heavily relied on the platforms to communicate and reach out to various audiences.
Shortly after the outage, Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram took to Twitter to clarify the outages and subsequently announced the apps were back online for users.
Bloomberg on Monday, October 4, 2021, reported that Founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, who also owns WhatsApp and Instagram, had his net worth tumble by US$7 billion in a matter of hours due to the widespread outage.