NEW YEAR SCHOOL TO FOCUS ON E-AGRICULTURE

Posted on: www.dailyguideghana.com

By William Yaw Owusu

Tuesday, November 22, 2016

The 68th Annual New Year School and Conference will open next year with a focus on e-agriculture.

The School of Continuing and Distance Education (SCDE) of the College of Education, University of Ghana, which organizes the annual event, announced in Accra on Thursday that the theme for the conference will be “Promoting National Development through Agricultural Modernization: The Role of ICT.”

At the launch of the 68th Annual New Year School and Conference in Accra, a Deputy Minister of Agriculture Dr. Ahmed Yahubu Alhassan, said Ghana cannot be left out of the agriculture revolution where the application of ICT to boost production and supply has become a major motivation.

“We can’t use 19th Century tools in the 21st Century to deliver 21st Century lifestyles. We have to invest heavily in agriculture which is the future of sustainable development,” he said.

He said the government is working hard on ICT in agriculture where there is going to be what he called ‘massive technology transfer’ and added that as at the end of 2015, agriculture accounted for 20 percent of Ghana’s GDP.

Prof. Michael Tagoe, Dean, SCDE at the University of Ghana, said it was regrettable that all recent data available showed clearly that the agriculture sector was not performing.

He said “everybody is talking about a steady decline in the sector although the need to revolutionalize agriculture through the application of ICT was indentified in 2004.”

He said 12 years after the adoption of the strategy to deploy ICT in agriculture “very few of the strategies have been realized,” adding “there is global attention on the modernization of agriculture and Ghana has to be part of the movement.”

According to Prof Tagoe, the School in 2014 decided to focus on Ghana’s Information and Communications Technology (ICT) for Accelerated Development (ICT4AD) Policy and how ICT could be deployed and utilized to transform Ghana into an information-rich knowledge-based society.

“Although the policy has been in existence since 2004, the organizers of the Annual New Year School and Conference believe that the ICT4AD policy, has been relegated to the background and its mission and objectives appear have been neglected in national development approaches.”

He said “in order to raise awareness about this policy, the Annual New Year School’s themes have in the last three years focused on ICT and Education (2014), ICT and Governance (2015) and ICT and Health (2016). 

As we launch the 68th Annual New Year School and Conference, the organizers have identified agriculture as one of the critical sectors that can spur Ghana’s accelerated development because of its links with industry.”

“The agricultural sector is one of the important sectors in which ICTs could be deployed and utilized to support activities, including production, processing, marketing and distribution of agricultural products and services,” he added.

 “There is no doubt that the challenges facing agriculture could be addressed significantly by using ICTs, as ICT has been recognized as a key development enabler,” he added.

“Recently, much attention has been paid to the ICT in agriculture under the rubric, e-agriculture by the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) and other international organizations. ICT in agriculture is about design, development and deployment of innovative ways of using ICT tools with the primary focus on agriculture in the rural development domain.