Sam George charges Google to develop technology to combat flooding, waste management and traffic jams in Ghana.

Minister for Communication, Digital Technology and Innovations, Sam Nartey George has charge Google to develop technologies to help Ghana combat perennial flooding, waste management, and traffic jams.

Speaking at the launch of the Google AI Community Centre in Accra, the Minister told Google officials that they have up to next year to develop the technologies to deal with the three long-standing challenges, which he said the country is still grappling with.

Sam George said technology innovators must begin to think about how their solutions fix national challenges, and on that score he believes the three assignments he has given to Google are very critical and need immediate attention.

Perennial Flooding

The Minister noted that the perennial flooding in Ghana used to be only in Accra, but now “Cape Coast is flooding, Takoradi is flooding, Kumasi is flooding and even Tamale is flooding.”

He said the flooding poses a real national challenge that needs immediate innovative solutions developed by Google, which he will take to the Ministry of Water Resources, Works and Housing to rollout and deal with the flooding problem.

Waste Management

Sam George noted that Accra is a beautiful city but it is getting dirtier by the day and that means it is time for waste management to be done through the use of technology.

“I need you to figure out how we can manage our waste better and keep our cities clean,” he said.

Waste management in Ghana has for several years been done by the private sector at a very high cost to the state. But till date the it remains a big challenge. As a result, President John Mahama has recently indicated that, as part of his reset agenda, he has assigned a committee of experts are designing ways by which local government institutions will manage their own waste.

Per Sam George’s proposal, to Google, technology innovation will feature largely in the way local government institutions manage waste across the country.

Traffic Management

The third assignment, the Minister said, is for Google to develop a technology solution for traffic management.

He explained that as Ghana becomes a middle income country and more people acquire vehicles, the development of road infrastructure is being outpaced by the number of vehicles on the roads.

“You also realise that our traffic management system is not intelligent – sometimes there may be heavy traffic on one side of the road but the traffic lights will still be working as they have been programmed – they are not responsive to the traffic flow and time of day and that is something we need technology to fix,” he said.

Indeed, lately in Accra, traffic wardings are forced to ignore the traffic lights and control the traffic manually to help ease the heavy traffic jams.

In response to the Minister’s request, officials of Google Africa announced that they have already developed a traffic management solution called Green Light, which gathers data on vehicle emissions at any point in time to determine which side of town or the road has most traffic at what time of day, and that is programmed into the traffic lights to manage the situation automatically.

They assured the Minister that they will follow up with him to ensure that the solution, which is currently used in about 26 countries across the world, is rolled out in Ghana.