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The Vice President, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia has been on a working visit with a Ghanaian delegation to Estonia this week, holding talks on their digitalization journey, framework and impact.

While Ghana has made remarkable strides in the past seven years in the area of digitalization, Estonia is a global giant as they are widely regarded as the most digitally advanced country in the world.

During one of the meetings with Dr. Bawumia in the Estonian capital, Tallinn, officials of e-Estonia Academy which is one of Estonia's national digitalization agencies, revealed how the decision to digitize the nation and public services has immensely contributed to their fight against corruption.

"We inherited a very corrupt public system and there was the urgent need for us to do something", a senior official of e-Estonia said.

The official continued; "Digitalization has really helped us to sanitize the system and weed out corruption. As one of our former leaders used to say, 'you cannot bribe a computer'."

Apart from removing human interface in public service delivery, digitizing Estonia has also helped the country to maintain an efficient revenue generation through a transparent tax system where people and businesses easily file their tax returns online from the comfort of their homes.

Corruption Fight In Line With Dr. Bawumia's Vision

Estonia's success story in fighting corruption through digitization is in line with Dr. Bawumia's quest to ensuring same in Ghana.

Dr. Bawumia maintains that by digitizing many public services such as application and renewal of drivers license, passports, NHIS registration, port clearance among many others in Ghana, human contacts have been reduced significantly and corruption will be dealt a fatal blow once all these services fully integrate their database with the Ghana Card database which would not require holders of Ghana Card to physically show up at other offices or agencies to access services.

Even at this growing stage of Ghana's digitalization process, Dr. Bawumia maintains verifiable data at the DVLA, passport office and the ports shows considerable leap in revenue generation under online services as against meagre revenues generated before digitalization.

In 2016, he cited, before the application of passports went online, the passport office processed a total of 16,232 applications with a revenue of GHC1.1m.

Following the introduction of online application, the same passport office, in 2021, received and processed 498,963 online passport applications with a total revenue of GHC56.7m.

Data at other service providers also show significant increase in revenue, which, hitherto, would have ended up in private pockets.

At one of his meetings with the Estonian authorities, Vice President Bawumia reiterated his commitment and confidence in using technology to fight corruption in Ghana.

"As you have rightly said, a computer cannot be bribed and that is where we are going. Digitalization is an effective tool to fight corruption. You put in place an effective system which automatically fights corruption . That is the goal and we are on track."

Dr. Bawumia's delegation includes Minister of State at the Ministry of Finance, Mohammed Amin Adam as well as representatives from Ghana Revenue Authority, Volta River Authority, National Information and Technology Agency and the private sector; IT and Fintech companies.