The Minister of Communications, Mrs Ursula Owusu-Ekuful, has signed two memorandums of understanding (MoUs) with the Government of the State of Israel and Head of the Israel National Cybersecurity Directorate to boost co-operation to strengthen cybersecurity between the two countries.
The MoU which was signed at a three-day CyberTech Global 2020 conference last week in Tel Aviv, Israel is also to focus on co-operation to strengthen cybersecurity and co-operation between the two countries in the fields of telecommunications, post and information technologies.
The MoU also highlights the role of public and private organisations in managing cybersecurity risks, as well as the pivotal role of governments in developing and deploying policy measures, tools, regulatory and operational responses to mitigate cybersecurity risk.
Speaking at the signing ceremony, the Madam Owusu-Ekuful stated that this agreement, “provides opportunities for capacity-building which will complement the work that the Government of Ghana, through the Ministry of Communications, has already started in the field of Cyber Security.”
She noted that technology and processes alone are not enough to protect the citizens of Ghana and Israel, thus the need to develop the necessary human resource base to support the processes.
She said Ghana would seek support from Israeli universities and institutions, to train Ghanaian officials by means of academic exchanges and professional development courses.
“This MoU is a perfect mechanism to achieve this important goal for the Government of Ghana,” she stated.
The Minister also said the MoU is expected to further support Ghana’s development in cybersecurity, as the proposed Cybersecurity Bill is expected to be passed into law this year, as well as fully operationalize the National Cybersecurity Policy and Strategy.
“It is envisaged that the MoU will complement national efforts, especially in the area of cybersecurity research and development, towards achieving self-reliance and building exports of cybersecurity products and services in the sub-region,” she added.
Israel’s Minister of Communications, Mr David Amsalem and Mr Yigal Unna, Head of the Israel National Cybersecurity Directorate were present at the signing ceremony.
Ghana’s delegation at the conference was made up of representatives of the National Cyber Security Centre, National Communications Authority, National Information Technology Agency and members of the Ghanaian business community.
This year’s conference, CyberTech 2020, attracted high-level government officials, technocrats, experts and business leaders from across the world to deliberate on common challenges facing their countries/organisations and devise strategic policies to combat cybercrime worldwide.
Cybersecurity in Ghana
The Government has established both a computer emergency response team (CERT) and a security operations centre (SOC) for both the telecommunications and financial sectors: two critical areas of the digital ecosystem.
Other critical factors such as the Police Service, the military and national security services, which depend on information-sharing to defend Ghana against cybersecurity threats and cybercrime, will soon be added to the CERT and SOC projects.
Ghana has also launched a National Cyber Security Awareness Programme – “A Safer Digital Ghana” – and the initiative has led to citizens’ increased awareness of the four focus areas of the campaign: children, public, businesses and government.
In 2019 alone, more than 39,000 students from second-cycle institutions across all 16 regions of Ghana were sensitised under this initiative. To facilitate incident reporting by the public, Ghana launched a National Cybercrime/Cybersecurity Incident Reporting Point of Contact (PoC) on 1 October 2019.
