DEVELOPING AN EXPORT-ORIENTED ICT PRODUCTS AND SERVICES INDUSTRY Policy Context The Ghana ICT sector is under-developed, a recent study shows that the majority of the companies in this sector are small-to-medium scale ICT companies and most of these are mainly involved in distributive activities like retailing and the distribution of computer products and services, mainly computers and their peripherals and standard application software and packages. On the whole there is very little activity in the area of the production and development of ICT products for example assembly of computer hardware systems like personal computers. Apart from a handful of companies, most of which are small-scale set-ups involve in local assembly on a limited scale, the majority of companies retailing computer hardware import them as complete systems which they retail to the public. The majority of the applications software (mostly standard of-the-shelf products) on the Ghanaian market are not developed locally. The Ghanaian software development industry is still under-developed with only a couple of establishments involved in limited software development work; the majority of these are into customizing applications for clients with very little done in the area of developing systems from the scratch. In exception of a number of accounting, banking and database applications where there is some local software development efforts, the vast majority of Ghanaian companies involved in implementing ICT systems used imported software as turnkey ‘off-the-shelf’ software or slightly customized systems. On the whole, the majority of the ICT-related companies and service providers, trade in products and services with very little local context. In otherwise the vast majority of the companies locally trade in ICT products and services that have far less than 100% local context. A number of factors have been identified as inhibiting the growth of the local ICT industry. For example, given that the majority of ICT products on the Ghanaian market are imported, with very little local component; import duties and taxes on computer products and services are seen as having negative impact on the expansion of the ICT sector, a major part of which is involve in retailing of ICTs products and services. In fact, de-incentives like taxation and in particular import duties on computer products and services have been identified as a major factor inhibiting the growth of the Ghana ICT sector. The growth of the ICT sector is also being inhibited by lack of infrastructure development in areas like transport, telecommunications, and electricity. For example the lack of the electricity infrastructure in some sections of the country has been identified as a bottleneck to the expansion of ICT-related services. Also it is acknowledged that the development of Ghana’s information and knowledge economy will require a vibrant ICT industry that focuses on export oriented ICT products development and the provision of world-class services 49