Abstract:
Information is an important resource in the 21st century knowledge-based society.
Access to public sector information is being viewed as an important path to
strengthening democracy, good governance, public service and sustainable
development. Ghana is about to enact a right to information law (now The Right
to Information Bill) to provide a legal framework for making public sector
information accessible to the public. However, while the legal framework is
necessary, it is not sufficient to ensure real access to public sector information by
the public. This paper highlights the need for designing policy and institutional
frameworks in general and a technical infrastructure in particular for actuating the
provisions of the anticipated law. With specific focus on access to public sector
spatial information, the paper assesses the conditions, opportunities and
imperatives for building SDI, at least, as part of the technical infrastructure for
making public sector information discoverable, retrievable and usable to the
public. The paper argues that the passage of the Right to Information Bill into law
carries with significant opportunity for the development of SDI. Steps are then
proposed for creating the SDI in a three phase approach: initiation, evolution and
building, and integration, institutionalization and scaling up. The significance of
the paper lies in its pioneering contribution to the emergent discourse on the
design of policy, institutional framework and technical infrastructure for making
PSI (especially public sector spatial information) easily accessible to the
Ghanaian public in anticipation of the right to information law
