UNIDO seems to favour Ghana for ICT test centre in West Africa – ITU Official

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has proposed to set up five laboratory centres in Africa that will be used to test the quality of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) equipment that are imported into the continent.

The ITU indicates that these centres will be on regional basis on the continent because it is expensive to set up such a facility.

“It’s more expensive when you develop it further into conformity and interoperability testing”, Mr Malcom Johnson, ITU Telecommunication Standardisation Chief Bureau, told ghanabusinessnews.com in an exclusive interview at the just-ended ITU conference in Accra.

Mr. Johnson cited the fourth phase of the Tanzania centre project which is the second testing facility in Africa after South Africa as costing $25 million. “So it’s a lot of money.”

For West Africa, Ghana and Nigeria are two leading contenders for the centre to be cited in their respective countries but Mr. Johnson reveals that some African-Francophone countries are also interested.

But citing comments made by the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO), the body mandated to set up such centres for the ITU, Mr Johnson observes that Ghana seems to be ahead of the other countries showing interest in hosting the centre in West Africa.

UNIDO earlier on said it runs a lot of testing centres for other equipment in Ghana through the Ghana Standards Board (GSB) and if it has one on ICT in the country to serve West Africa that will not be a bad idea.

“From what they are saying, in West Africa, they have established a number of test centres for other industry sectors not in ICT in Ghana…so from what they are saying seems to favour having one here in Ghana for ICT,” he said.

But he was quick to add that the ITU does not decide where to build these centres.

“It’s not for ITU to pick where these laboratories are going to be. It’s the responsibility of the countries in the region to decide where the labs should be cited.”

He encouraged countries not have duplicated centres saying “they should rather specialize in different areas so that they don’t duplicate the same thing and accept each other’s results by having mutual arrangements among each other.”

Officials at Ghana’s National Communications Authority (NCA) are also working hard for the centre to be established in the country.

Mr. Joshua Peprah, Director of Regulatory Administration at the NCA says it has become necessary for such a centre because it will enable Ghana and other West African countries to reject fake ICT equipment such as mobile phones, computers, telecommunications gadgets and other sophisticated tools that are entering the region.

Already the continent is fighting the menace of electronic waste that is dumped in Africa by developed countries.

It is believe that the problem will become worse if measures are not taken especially when the digital migration is over by 2015.

“Africa has become a dumping ground for electronic waste especially in the wake of the fact that they have already facilitated the process of migrating from analogue to digital radio and television…they find Africa suitable ground to bring in electronic waste,” said Ghana’s Communications Minister, Mr. Haruna Iddrissu during the ITU Conference in Accra attended by over 200 delegates across Africa.

A new comprehensive assessment report of the e-waste situation in Ghana found that 171,000 tons of e-waste reaches the country’s informal recycling sector, adding that the amount of material that reaches the formal recycling sector accounted only for 0.2%.

Informal recyclers operating in the country collect obsolete electronics and electrical equipment, dismantle them and remove valuable parts. They often burn cables to extract copper wires for sale. They do these in the open and without any protective clothing, despite the inherent dangers that they are possibly exposed to from the toxic chemicals contained in e-waste.

The process of testing such equipment is known as conformance and interoperability testing.

Conformance and interoperability testing is important to identify the non-compliance aspects of the equipment being tested, as defined by accepted standards in the industry, that may interfere in the quality of the network service being provided.

By Ekow Quandzie