aiti-kace

The Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT (AITI-KACE), Ghana's first Advanced Information Technology Institute works to stimulate the growth of the ICT Sector in ECOWAS. Established in 2003, through a partnership between the Government of Ghana and the Government of India, this state-of-the-art facility provides a dynamic environment for innovation, teaching and learning as well as practical research on the application of ICT4D in Africa.

The Centre houses West Africa's first supercomputer as well as top-of-the-line desktops and laptops. The spacious meeting and lecture rooms as well as the 802.11 wireless network guarantee that the AITI-KACE can host close to a 1000 IT professionals, researchers, visitors and trainees at any given time.

AITI-KACE is a demonstration of the power of private, public and voluntary sector collaboration. The Centre places a strong emphasis on building networks and developing mutually beneficial partnerships.

We work with institutions located in six continents, Africa, Asia, Australia, Latin America, Europe and the United States. A public sector institution run on private sector lines with a strong emphasis on social development, AITI-KACE represents the best in modern service delivery models.

The AITI-KACE's Technology Transformation Seminars (TTS) are making an impact on the ICT sector in Ghana. These give stakeholders a platform to share experiences and technical know-how. Our bi-monthly Stakeholder meetings equip participants with knowledge on recent innovative IT technologies and create the forum for our clients and the public to effectively discuss cutting-edge issues on ICT.

We also offer specialised training courses to decision-makers and important social groups such as parliamentarians. Our outreach efforts are intended to stimulate interest as well as demystify ICT with special stakeholder groups including students in educational institutions throughout Ghana as well as important groups such as market women, taxi drivers, etc. We also offer space to dedicated geeks such as the Accra Linux User Group.

A special project the i2CAP (I too can programme) builds programming skills among students in Senior Secondary Schools. Corporate training programmes are geared towards improving productivity and profits towards overall competitivity. The three major areas of focus are Security including cyberforensics; business simulation modelling and a set of specially targeted training for the sub-region's nascent Chief Information Officer (CIO) cadre including e-leadership, e-procurement etc.

Course participants at AITI-KACE can choose from a broad menu of course offerings in networking, web development and software training with an emphasis to developing practical hands-on skills. Special vendor partnerships with CISCO and ORACLE underpin offerings in those areas. Many core course offerings are based on curriculum developed by our partner in India, the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing. By popular demand course offerings in multi-media are being expanded to cover podcasting, blogging etc.

In addition to core capacity-building programmes the dynamic AITI-KACE team offers consulting services designed to assist individuals, institutions and businesses to keep pace with the rapid developments in information and communication technologies. Our team of top developers works to respond to demands for specialised software. The multi-media group works with top web developers raise the quality and quantity of African content on the web. The research programme is building a West African network in supercomputing designed to help build bridges between specialist researchers within the sub-region. The primary focus of this work is climate modelling. ICT for Development projects involve working with communities to test innovative ICT solutions in different rural and urban settings. This work is based on the premise that ICT is a tool for empowerment and for reducing all nature of divide