Ghana’s right to information bill: opportunity for SDI as a technical infrastructure

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