Free WIFI in Senior High Schools to begin in October - Minister

The Ghana Government will roll out a free WIFI initiative for Senior High Schools (SHS) in October this year, the Minister of Communications,Mrs Ursula Owusu Ekuful has disclosed

The minister said, in spite of the pandemic which has brought about closure of schools, it was important that the stakeholders prepared for the future.

She said the government would also implement an enhanced rural telephony project to provide network access for all under-developed areas in the country where network was poor

“It is important that we extend connectivity to every part of the country hence the implementation of the 'enhanced rural telephony project' which will bring networks to unserved and underserved parts of the country, where there are network problems.”

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Per a report by the Ghana News Agency, Mrs Ekuful was speaking at the climax of the 10th Edition of National Girls in ICT Day held in the Nkwanta South Municipality of the Oti Region.

The celebration instituted by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) to encourage girls to adopt and participate in technology.

Prior to the event, 580 girls were selected from eight districts and municipalities in the region to participate in an ICT competition.

The 60 girls who excelled were trained in coding, which offers them the opportunity to explore the world of technology through the creation of websites, computer games, interactive arts, mobile applications and animation stories using programming languages such as JAVA Script, Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

Ten girl-child coordinators and 54 teachers were later presented with laptops, citations and routers.

The Minister said the celebration was made biennial instead of the annual training, while mentorship workshops and an ‘open day’ experience was included to enable best performing girls to spend days with women working in technology-related disciplines.

She said there were many Information and Communication Technology (ICT) related job opportunities in areas of health, law, accounting, teaching and education hence the need for participants to take their studies seriously.

“There is nothing you cannot do if you put your mind to it. It is not impossible, just dream, think, believe and work hard at it, seek help, find out how and you just get on with it,” she said.

Mrs Ekuful called on the Ghana Investment Fund for Electronic Communications (GIFEC) and teachers they had trained to establish coding clubs in all the participating schools in the Region to sustain the interest of the girls and to enable them to introduce their mates to the initiative.