Bawumia outlines key focus areas for his campaign

Vice President, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia and flagbearer of the New Patriotic Party(NPP) has stated that his presidential campaign will focus on three thematic areas.

Dr Mahamudu Bawumia believes that his drive for digitization will help him achieve success in these three areas.

The Vice President spoke to New African Magazine when he made this known.

“There are different areas. Digitalisation and leveraging technology for inclusive economic growth would be one area. We want to make Ghana the digital hub of Africa. The world right now is looking at systems data, artificial intelligence and all of that. We can use that to improve agricultural productivity, to improve healthcare and to improve education. These are for me the three big areas,” he said.

He continued “For all the concerns about artificial intelligence and data it is very important that we get the best out of that for Africa. We need to go into predictive agriculture. Today in Ghana we have drones delivering medicines and vaccines. We are networking all the hospitals so that your records are centralised. We have launched Africa’s first national scale e-pharmacy so that when you have a prescription you can go online and find the nearest pharmacy to you. If you have artificial intelligence getting all this data, you can have solutions to diseases which, given our own DNA in Africa, may be quite different from other places. We need to get healthcare outcomes which are suitable for us, so we need to develop our own research.

Food security is another area I want to focus on. I want to introduce what I call a golden age of the maximisation of the benefits of our natural resources: gold, lithium, and domestic beneficiation. I introduced a new policy recently – gold for oil – in which we are leveraging the gold to pay for oil and not looking for scarce dollars that we don’t have. And there’s the energy transition, with a focus on renewables. And to unleash the private sector, including in infrastructure. The government can’t be doing everything. These are some of the areas I want to really touch on.