Telecommunications as development factor in West Africa

The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Parliament is organising a delocalised meeting on the theme “Role of Telecommunications and Information Technology in Achieving Regional Development, Peace, Security and Human Rights” from 27 to 31 July 2021 in Winneba, Ghana.  The joint Committee: Political Affairs, Peace, Security and African Peer Review Mechanism/Legal Affairs and Human Rights/Telecommunications and Information Technology is steering the meeting.

The aim of this important parliamentary meeting is to analyse ways and means of finding lasting solutions to the problems of telephone roaming, peace, security and human rights for shared progress in the West African region. The current wave of technological changes have created new opportunities for multilateral cooperation in various areas, including sustainable development, conflict prevention, humanitarian response and peace operations.

However, transnational cybercrimes are posing serious threat to business development.

This threat constitutes a major concern to the ECOWAS Parliament and will be at centre of the deliberations during the meeting. The Winneba meeting therefore provides an avenue for the regional Parliamentarians to discuss the opportunities, as well as the risks associated with insecure use of information and communication technologies.

The ECOWAS Parliament is composed of 115 seats. As regards the sharing of the seats, each Member State is guaranteed a minimum of five seats. The remaining forty seats are shared on the basis of the population of each country. On the basis of this distribution, Nigeria has 35 seats, Ghana 8, Côte d’Ivoire 7, Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali, Niger and Senegal have 6 seats each. The other countries, namely Benin, Cape Verde, Gambia, Guinea Bissau, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Togo have 5 seats each.