NITA SIGNS MOU WITH ODEKRO and other organizations

The National Information Technology Agency(NITA)  is the government agency responsible for the implementation of the e-Government project. NITA in 2012, begun an open data initiative christened the Ghana Open Data Initiative (GODI) to create an information portal to release raw government data to the public. The GODI portal can found here

GODI also seeks to partner local developers and organistions to build applications driven by the available datasets and build an ecosystem around the data with the involvement of CSOs.

In pursuit of this goal, NITA/GODI signed an MOU with Odekro as partners in promoting Open Data in Ghana on Thursday January 9, 2014.

Odekro(www.odekro.org) was launched in 2012 to monitor Ghanaian Parliamentarians and promote transparency of the Parliamentary proceedings by making hansards easily accessible to the general public. The initial Odekro project successfully implemented a solution that provides fully searchable and indexed records of parliamentary proceedings. The project proposed within this document is a plan to scale up the existing Odekro effort to increase awareness, usability, and to address current challenges.

The ease of access to hansards that Odekro provides has been a step in the right direction to promote transparency in government. However, there still exists a gap between the availability of information and the ability of the average citizen to utilize it for action towards a desirable outcome.  Ultimately, Parliamentary Proceedings are demystified.

The intervention will bridge the gap by providing easy to understand information to citizens as well as simple and effective channels for expressing opinions on the actions of elected officials.

NITA, also signed similar MOUs with:

Center for RemoteSensing and Geographic Information Services (CERGIS)  who focus on GIS (Geographical Information Systems), Remote Sensing applications and the use of GIS solutions in industries such as Agriculture, Energy, Forestry and Natural resources, etc.

Ghana Library Authority (GhLA) to use the libraries across the country as centers for information and data collection, research and provide access to the GODI portal and other Open Data portal via internet/ICT facilities.

Cell Afrique is an application service provider which provides mobile and web solutions.