Institutes urge Ghana's government to utilize blockchain technology

The Young Africans for Opportunities (YAFO), a non-profit organization and the Ghana Institute of Procurement and Supply (GIPS) have advised the government of Ghana to take advantage of blockchain technology in delivering governance.

The details 

• According to reports, officials from both organizations made the call at a policy dialogue event organized by YAFO, under the theme: “Unlocking Economic Growth in Ghana through Fintech and Blockchain Innovations for Free Trade in Africa.”
• Nathaniel Dwamena, YAFO’s president, advised the government to embrace blockchain technology to reduce corruption in the country. 
• Dwamena noted that blockchain goes beyond cryptocurrencies and could be deployed in elections. He added that Ghana lost eight lives during its last elections, an occurrence he believes can be avoided if blockchain is adopted. 
• On the other hand, the administrator of GIPS, Vincent Laryea Mensah urged Ghana to deploy blockchain technology to plug financial leakage in the procurement and supply process. 
• Mensah said that the country would make enough money to not need external financing just by plugging these leaks. 

What was said 

• In a chat with media outlets, Dwamena said: 

“For now, where we’ve gotten to, fourteen years since the launch of blockchain, a lot of people are adopting it … with blockchain, government must see the need to find ways to adopt regulations and draw the industry closer. We can do a lot with smart contract and blockchain and these can help reduce corruption in our system.” 

Of note

• Despite electronic voting being viewed as a potential use case for blockchain technology, no country has implemented it in a national election thus far. 
• “We are still quite far from a situation where any kind of distributed ledger would be considered” — at least in a national election,” Marta Piekarska, senior DAO strategist at ConsenSys told Cointelegraph.  

Before now

• Ghana-based Institute for Liberty and Policy Innovation (ILAPI) — headed by Dwamena — launched the Center for Coin Liberty a year ago, to engage the public and influence blockchain legislation in Ghana.  
• While there are no explicit crypto regulations in Ghana, the country ranked ninth out of 27 countries with the highest crypto adoption rate, per a recent cryptocurrency Adoption Index, conducted by Finder.com.