Businesses to get digital certificates for easy identification online

Businesses to get digital certificates for easy identification online to ensure absolute public confidence in the reliability of digital systems, platforms, and transactions in the country and beyond. The government has rolled out a policy to provide all identifiable businesses and individuals with digital certificates to enable easy identification of all by all online.

Ursula Owusu-Ekuful speech at the National Information Technology Agency (NITA) event

Minister of Communications and Digitalization, Ursula Owusu-Ekuful, disclosed this during a Digital Trust Conference at the maiden National ICT Week organized by the ICT regulator, the National Information Technology Agency (NITA).

She noted that, to the extent that people and institutions transacting in a digital environment do not have the benefit of seeing each other physically, trust is very critical to ensuring reliability, hence the need for a digital certificate that underpins easy authentication and verification of each person and entity’s identity on the digital platforms.

In that regard, Ursula Owusu-Ekuful said NITA will later this year provide private entities with authorization and licenses to issue digital certificates to various businesses and individuals for easy identification on digital platforms.

She said the digital certificates to be issued by the licensed bodies will be tailored to various use cases and scenarios for businesses and individuals, adding “this certification is crucial for expanding the scope and reliability of digital trust within Ghana’s digital landscape and beyond.”

The Minister therefore encouraged various entities interested in issuing digital certificates for particular purposes to reach out to NITA for guidance.

She noted that the deployment of root public key infrastructure (PKI) in Ghana has improved cross border transactions tremendously by being used to enhance Ghana Card and visa issuance, and soon the chip-embedded passport, adding that the PKI will go live before the end of the year with another layer to improve trust within the digital ecosystem.

“Government through NITA has registered Ghana with the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) on the public key directory platform to enable us to share digital certificates across borders for authentication and verification purposes—and also ensure that Ghana’s own PKI platform is managed in alignment with international best practices.

“This is what has allowed our Ghana Card to be accepted as a travel document from over 44,000 airports across the world into Ghana,” she said.

Ursula Owusu-Ekuful noted that the government’s digital transformation agenda hinges on three legs: mobile money interoperability to ensure easy digital financial transactions and financial inclusion; a digital address system to ensure easy physical location; and digital certification to ensure easy authentication and identification of persons and entities on digital platforms.

The government has built a robust mobile money interoperability platform and also established the digital address system and is now working on rolling out digital certificates to ensure digital trust.

The Minister believes that building digital trust means ensuring that data is protected, transactions are secured, and institutions and individuals on the digital platforms are trustworthy, adding that it creates an environment where innovation can thrive, security is upheld, and citizens have confidence in the services and digital platforms they use.

Digital transactions ride on data sharing, which requires that individuals and institutions must trust the platform and entities with whom they are sharing data, hence the need for digital certificates to ensure trust.

In addition to working to ensure digital trust, the Minister said government has also established an integrated security operations center which monitors and fights cyber threats, adding that more is being done to improve that cybersecurity architecture to further boost public confidence.

Digital Skills

A critical feature in ensuring digital trust is digital skills, the Minister noted, explaining that without a good understanding among citizens of how the various digital systems work, it will be difficult for citizens to trust and make use of those systems.

“Government has therefore committed resources through various channels to train citizens to acquire the much needed digital skills to drive the digital economy agenda. This journey will include reskilling and upskilling Ghanaians, especially those in the public sector,” she said.

According to her, the Ghana Digital Acceleration Project has specifically allocated resources to provide public servants with digital skills, and in line with that, the Ghana Cares Unit at the MoCD and the Tony Blair Institute have designed a curriculum dubbed “DigSmart” for digital skills training for all levels of the public service.

Meanwhile, Smart Africa Alliance has also set up the Smart Africa Academy, of which Ghana is part, and has trained public servants as well.

Chief Technical Officer at NITA, Solom Kofi Richardson, confirmed that indeed NITA will soon establish a unit that will authorize and license entities to issue various types of digital certificates to businesses and individuals.

He said so long as an entity or even an item is in its digital form and being used for a digital transaction, it can qualify for certification, urging businesses to come up with innovative ideas for various use cases that will require licensing and authorization.