We Need A Paperless Economy – Minister

Dr Edward Omane Boamah, Deputy Minister of Environment, Science And Technology, on Wednesday called on institutions, especially government establishments, to move away from a paper-intensive processes to using digital data management systems.

He was speaking at the opening of a two-day seminar, organised by Inter-regional Bridge Group (IBG) in collaboration with Computhink Inc and Kodak on the theme: “Government and business solutions in Action-Ghana 2011”.

Dr Omane Boamah said in Ghana, retrieval of documents in paper form was very difficult and may sometimes require the person requesting the document to pay an amount of money.

This, he said, was due to the fact that that paper may have collected a lot of dust or may even have been misplaced.
Dr Omane Boamah said the process of retrieving becomes laborious to the person who has to retrieve it especially if he/she has medical conditions such as asthma, which can be triggered by dust particles.
He said the adoption of an efficient data management system would ensure easy storage and retrieval of data and a paperless economy.
Dr Omane Boamah said: “A paperless economy is what we need,” and asked the organisers to brief government on the outcome of the seminar so that it would adopt the system.

He said that the poverty gap between sub-Saharan Africa and other developed countries was also a technological gap that needed to be filled rapidly.