This opinion piece was written by by Mohammed Gazali Salifu, special assistant to director of research statistics information management, Ministry of Health, Ghana.

All around the world, technology innovations have been incorporated by national governments to help improve efficiency and delivery of services provided to citizens.

But Ghana’s civil service is far behind, still engulfed by traditional methods of customer delivery.

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Citizens complain about delays in processing their documents, especially in major ministries and agencies like the ministry of finance, the ministry of foreign affairs, the births and deaths registry, the accountant general department — and many others.

Somehow, the bureaucratic engine of government has not even managed to establish an efficient, modern system for delivering mail and correspondence. Correspondence between ministries, agencies and customers is still done through the traditional mail delivery system — in person delivery.

Letters between ministries are delivered manually through secretaries

Letters between various ministries and agencies are delivered manually through messengers or secretaries. Secretaries find it hard to figure out where letters are brought from and who needs to act and follow up — making it difficult for the ministry to meet schedules and deadlines.

Intra-ministerial directorate written communications' deliveries are also done manually — far less effective and efficient than it should be. For example, there have been several instances where civil servants have missed invitations to workshops because a letter was brought to the chief director and delayed at his secretariat too long.

Many secretaries also need to move around and between various offices during the day to deliver all this correspondence, including to far away directorates, further hurting productivity.

Furthermore, the internet connectivity in most ministries isn’t even strong enough to deliver emails, so many offices are forced to buy broadband internet, burdening already limited resources.

This traditional system invariably reduces efficiency and productivity

This traditional system invariably reduces efficiency and productivity in the workplace. It is a sorry state — and many valuable opportunities to improved policymaking and implementation are missed due to avoidable delays.

Government must act quickly to assist the civil service. Government should implement delivery software and technology to enable easy communications between directorates, agencies and ministries. This would vastly improve productivity, efficiency and effectiveness.

Alongside implementing a delivery software package, the government should look at improving the internet network strength of the various ministries. This would enable them to use the email delivery system efficiently, which could dramatically speed up and improve service delivery.

The time is now. The current government has demonstrated political will to improve ICT systems because it is in the process of implementing an e-procurement system, with support from partner international organisations.

With determined government investment, the efficiency of the delivery system would be greatly — and easily — improved. And, this would even help curb corruption, since many customer service agents take undue advantage of delays to charge citizens exorbitant prices to process their documents faster and in time.

The need for delivery technology is urgent. If Ghana’s civil service is to be effective and fast — in line with countries all around the world — government needs to step in now to help implement it. — Mohammed Gazali Salifu

(Picture credit: Flickr/World Bank)

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