A global data protection expert, Patricia Adusei-Poku, has urged Ghana to adopt a unified national system for managing data.
According to her, it is high time public institutions adopted standard formats so their systems can work together better and support innovation and efficiency.
Speaking on data governance, sovereignty, and cross-border data flows at an event in Accra on Monday, November 24, 2025, Adusei-Poku emphasised that Ghana must urgently improve how data is defined, categorised, and stored across government agencies.
“… We need to have something that standardises our understanding and the meanings around what we have, and then creates policies on how, and even the formats in which we save our documents,” she said.
Adusei-Poku also highlighted that the technology sector already uses clear data classifications, public, private, restricted, and sensitive.
She suggested that this approach could serve as a model for the country, which should begin applying similar categorisation principles across all levels of governance.
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“In technology, we have data categorisation: what is public, what is private, what is restricted, and what is sensitive. As a country, we need to start putting these values to the data we have and then, from the national level to the local level, begin to standardise how we access it and the formats we use,” she suggested.
The expert also noted that several government institutions are inconsistent in their system operations, stating that a more uniform approach must be adopted to remove major barriers and improve efficiency and system integration.
“We go to government offices and every office has a letterhead in a different format and written differently, but we need to begin to standardise our operations and have a consistent approach to how we gather and use data so that systems can start speaking to each other and integrate. The big word we use in technology to say that systems are truly talking to each other is interoperable. We want interoperability; we want system integration.
“… We want systems to seamlessly connect with each other. This can only happen when every institution is using a standardised format from which we can innovate and develop. We have to understand the national standard formats and be able to categorise, within the Ghanaian ecosystem, the accepted standards. That means innovators can go ahead and innovate knowing what the acceptable standards and formats are, and that is data governance,” she added.
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