ghananlpcommunity/ghana-gov-speeches-sentences huggingface dataset:
The Court of today is a living institution: busier, more accessible, and more transparent than ever.
We have embraced technology, strengthened processes, and worked tirelessly to deliver justice that is timely and fair.
Our courts, from the apex to the districts, serve millions who turn to us when all else feels uncertain.
We celebrate the present through concrete actions already in motion.
Through the E-Justice Programme, we are moving toward digital filing, digital service, virtual hearings, and digitized records — making justice faster, more efficient, and more accessible.
We have introduced extended court sittings via the Two Streams system, turning time itself into an ally of justice.
Through specialised courts for emerging areas of law, we are acknowledging that the law must grow with society.
And through the ongoing revision of our Rules of Court, we are attempting something fundamental: to ensure that procedure serves justice… and does not suffocate it.
We are equally strengthening security and infrastructure around the courts, ensuring that justice is delivered in safe and dignified environments.
And we are actively and cautiously reforming legal education, to achieve a twin solution of expanding access, while preserving quality.
These are not distant dreams; they are deliberate steps that are already underway.
And if we are to be honest—and on a day like this, we must be—we cannot say that all is well.
There are still delays.
There are still barriers.
There are still moments when justice feels distant to those who need it most.
And confidence is shaken when justice comes too late, or costs too much, or feels too far.
The next chapter of our Court must not be rhetoric; it must not be reform for its own sake; it must be a deep moral commitment to excellence in the delivery of justice for all.
The future of this Court must be: faster—because delayed justice is diluted justice.
Clearer—because obscure justice is inaccessible justice.
Closer to the people—because distant justice is denied justice.
THE ANNIVERSARY AS A NATIONAL MOMENT In the coming weeks and months, the Planning Committee’s rich programme will bring the vision of this anniversary celebration to life: public lectures that take the conversation on justice to the people, a powerful documentary capturing our journey from Cape Coast to the present, a commemorative compendium preserving our institutional memory, legal aid outreach to underserved communities, and meaningful legacy projects that will outlast this moment.
These are opportunities for every Ghanaian — young and old, lawyer and layperson — to reconnect with the Judiciary and help shape its next chapter.
My dear friends, the Judiciary does not stand apart from Ghana.
We are woven into her story — her struggles, her progress, and her highest aspirations.
When the Supreme Court is strong and independent, the rule of law stands firm.
When justice is accessible, impartial, and humane, democracy breathes freely.
Behind every case is a human story: a family, a livelihood, a life in the balance.
Courts are human institutions — only as strong as the integrity of those who serve in them, only as trusted as the fairness they demonstrate, and only as relevant as the justice they deliver.
No technology or reform can replace conscience and judgment.
CLOSING REMARKS Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen, as we unveil the theme, the logo, the anniversary cloth, and other symbols of this milestone, let us do so with pride — but also with a solemn promise.
A promise that the next 150 years will witness a Court that is even more just, more efficient, more trusted, and more deeply reflective of the best values of our nation.
As I have often said, my own tenure is but a brief relay in a long race.
What we build must be a system of continuity — where each generation carries the baton forward with greater purpose.
To the hardworking Planning Committee, ably led by my brother, His Lordship Justice Richard Adjei Frimpong, and to all members of the sub-committees, staff, and partners who have laboured tirelessly in a short time — thank you.
Your dedication has made this launch possible.
To our traditional leaders and all invited guests — your presence honours us and reminds everyone that justice has deep cultural roots in Ghanaian society.
Excellencies, My Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen, may I invite you to join me in launching the Supreme Court of Ghana @150.
May the Supreme Court of Ghana rise to even greater heights — not as a relic of history, but as a living, breathing instrument of justice for all.
May God bless the Supreme Court of Ghana.
May God bless our beloved homeland Ghana.
And may justice, peace, and prosperity continue to reign among us.
1 SPEECH DELIVERED BY THE HON.
MINISTER FOR COMMUNICATIONS, HON.
URSULA OWUSU-EKUFUL AT THE CLIMAX OF THE NATIONAL GIRLS- IN-ICT DAY CELEBRATION ON FRIDAY 11TH MAY, 2018, AT THE GREAT HALL, KNUST, KUMASI, ASHANTI REGION Nana Kwaku Amankwah Sarkofie, Sawiahene and rep of his Royal Highness, Otumfuo Osei Tutu II, Asantehene The Chief of Staff Hon.
Regional Minister The Deputy Secretary General of the International Telecommunication Union, Deputy Minister for Communications, Hon.
Sowah Odotei The Municipal Chief Executive of KMA, The Regional Director of Education, Heads of Institutions gathered here, Nananom, Invited Guests, Pupils from selected schools, Friends of the Media, Ladies and Gentlemen.
Let me, first and foremost, convey our sincere gratitude to HRH Otumfuo Osei Tutu II Asantehene foe graciously welcoming us to the Ashanti region to conduct this exercise over the past 3 weeks.
His Majesty’s passion for education and campaign to expand and improve education in the country is legendary.
We pray for his long reign and may his wisdom continue to guide and strengthen our resolve to bring the benefits of education to the youth, especially the girl child.
This will enable them realise the potential of ICT to provide empowerment and an escape from the poverty trap that has long haunted our national development.
Your Majesty, we also wish you a belated Happy Birthday.
2 This is the seventh in the series that is celebrated on rotation basis among the regions of the country but this years celebration is exceptional, indeed, the profile of this year’s event has been greatly enhanced in that for the first time, the Chief of Staff, Hon.
Frema Osei Pare is here and the Deputy Secretary General of ITU, Mr.
Malcolm Johnson, is participating in the event outside the ITU Headquarters in Geneva.
We appreciate your presence, and we are thankful that you have found time to grace the occasion.
Regional Minister and his team, including the MCE have been fantastic.
Thank you Nana Chairman, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen, Our celebration of the Girls-in-ICT Day is in line with internationally adopted recommendations to implement initiatives aimed at bridging the Digital Gender Divide and all countries all over the world are encouraged to carry out activities that are targeted at creating awareness on ICT careers and encourage the participation of girls and young women in ICT and technology-related careers.
According to the ITU News Magazine, in 2016 alone, more than 66,000 girls and young women in 138 countries worldwide took part in the celebrations of the International Girls-in-ICT Day.
As a member of the ITU, we been celebrating this initiative on a regional basis across the country and Greater Accra, Eastern, Volta, Northern and Brong Ahafo Regions have had their turns.
over 3,000 girls have been trained since the inception of the initiative in 2012.
During this period, selected girls are given basic computer appreciation skills to help demystify the notion of ICT as a highly technical field reserved for brilliant and exceptional students.
3 I am glad to say that the Ministry, in consultations with relevant stakeholders has provided basic computer appreciation skills and this year, this has been escalated to provide coding/programming skills.
This is to make programming easy and fun for our girls and also inculcate in them, the can do spirit.
Software development is about expression, creativity and practical application.
The whole concept of coding is to make it easy to bend, join, break and combine code in a much easier way for this new generation of children, hence the need to expose them to it early.
I can announce that the ministry of education is in the process of reviewing the curriculum of schools to institutionalize coding as a subject.
From what I observed at Nkwantakese in the Afigya Sekyere District when I visited the girls during their training, and the feedback from their instructors, I can confidently say our girls are really enthusiastic to learn and take advantage of opportunities existing within the ICT sector.
Your Majesty, professional mentorships are vitally important in fields where the odds are “stacked against” rising individuals.
Women jump multiple hurdles in ICT related careers and having the advice of a woman who has already been there can vastly improve the ability of women and young girls new to or emerging in this field to realise that success is possible.
For this reason and also for the first time, a mentorship programme was held for all the girls participating in the event to encourage them as they interact with female mentors to excel.
We will give opportunities to the girls who performed well during the training to obtain further training and also visit exciting places to see the practical application of Information and Communications Technologies.
This year’s celebration is unique, as the best 10 girls will be given awards.
In addition computer laboratories will be established in the schools of the first 3 exceptional 4 students for the benefit of their colleagues who could not get the opportunity to be selected.
The world is gearing towards automation and it has been estimated by ICT experts that about five (5) million traditional jobs will be lost by the year 2020 to be replaced with IT jobs.
This has caused a global reawakening and hence, the need to properly engage, condition, and introduce our girls and young women to ICT much earlier in their growing life in an orchestrated effort with the help of parents, teachers and society at large in order to enable them take advantage of this opportunity and make informed choices on their career paths.
As we implement the Girls-in-ICT initiative, and bridge the digital gender divide, it is important that we create the appropriate environment to sustain the interest of not only our young maidens but their male counterparts as well.
The Ministry of Communications will ensure the availability of broadband infrastructure throughout the country and through its Agencies such as the Ghana Investment Fund for Electronic Communications (GIFEC), it will provide support to equip schools and the various Community Information Centers (CICs) to promote e-learning and other digital services.
I urge our girls to take advantage of these facilities and break through all the barriers, The protection of the cyber space is a key priority of Government and effort is being made under the national cybersecurity policy and strategy to ensure the security of our ICT infrastructure and the online services provided so that they do not pose a threat to citizens, especially children who have become conversant with ICT.
A Child Online Protection framework document has also been developed to guide the implementation of activities aimed at protecting our children as they take advantage of the opportunities that ICTs bring.
This is being undertaken in collaboration with other stakeholders, and I take the opportunity to invite Us all to take part in sensitising 5 our youth on the positive use of the Internet and its protection from abuse and exploitation.
In line with the digitisation agenda of the Government, we will continue with broadband infrastructure to make ICT services available, accessible and affordable.
I am pleased to announce thatthe Ministry will install a Switch for Internet Exchange Point (IXP) in Kumasi this month.
This will be the second IXP in the country.
This infrastructure facility is to facilitate the exchange of local Internet traffic to reduce bandwidth cost and eventually a reduction in prices.
This is a demonstration of His Excellency the President’s commitment to deploy ICT for the realisation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and part of the Government’s programme to make Kumasi a major hub for business.
The Ministry of Communications will continue to support the incubation centre established at the KNUST and will shortly provide connectivity to the Regional Innovation Centre in Kumasi to promote R&D and nurture ICT business growth through innovation, and supporting creativity to build an entrepreneurial spirit among the youth especially women.
It will further support the digitize Ghana module of NABCO I look forward to seeing our girls becoming technology creators and innovators, and not users only in order to also take advantage of these opportunities to establish their businesses in future.
I believe that when the training received are taken seriously, our young ladies would master the art of coding and the development of applications to position themselves for greater opportunities in the ICT sector.
In line with the theme for this event, “Expanding horizons: Changing attitudes” we will continue to put measures in place to encourage our girls to become ICT 6 techies.
This will help reduce the gender stereotyping and disparities in the ICT/engineering sector and income inequality.
To you my beautiful, brilliant young ladies, I would like you to know that you are the next generation of leaders in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) and therefore, must take advantage of every opportunity that is given you to make this a possibility.
Celebrate your right to be here and be bold, daring and different.
To you, Hon.
Regional Minister, I say a big thank you for receiving this initiative and ensuring its successful implementation.
This event would have been difficult to organize without you and your team of staff at the Regional Coordinating Council.
I also thank the MCE of KMA and his colleagues for gracing the occasion.
I thank the organizing team for their painstaking work in the organization of this celebration and your efforts to make it happen.
In a special way, I extend appreciation to all teachers, Girl-Child Coordinators, CIC Managers and all others who lend a helping hand in training the girls.
I would like to extend special appreciation to the parents of the 600 selected girls who, in spite of the holidays, permitted their children to be selected to participate in the week-long training.
I salute the two persons with disability who ably participated in the training.
This clearly shows that disability does not mean inability.
We intend to organize this event bi annually now due to the tremendous interest and impact it has had.
We will train at least one thousand girls each year and will work to scale it up.
We will also introduce other competitions like ‘miss Geek’ to encourage and award female app and software developers God bless our Homeland Ghana.
1 SPEECH BY THE MINISTER FOR COMMUNICATIONS, HON.
URSULA OWUSU- EKUFUL, AT THE FORMAL OPENING OF THE NATIONAL CYBER SECURITY AWARENESS MONTH 2020 AND THE LAUNCH OF THE CHILD ONLINE PROTECTION (COP) PORTAL ACCRA, GHANA OCTOBER 1, 2020 Minister for Gender, Children and Social Protection, Hon.
Cynthia Mamle Morrison Deputy Chief of the US Embassy, Mr Christopher Lamora, representing the US Ambassador to Ghana Country Representative of UNICEF Ghana, Ms.
Anne-Claire Dufay National Cybersecurity Advisor, Dr Albert Antwi-Boasiako Distinguished Guests Ladies and Gentlemen.
It is my esteemed privilege to welcome all of you to this year’s edition of Ghana’s National Cyber Security Awareness Month, themed “Cybersecurity in the Era of COVID-19”.
Hosting this event for the 4th consecutive time, starting in 201 7 as a week-long event, is a feat I am proud to be associated with.
Our overarching theme for this year’s event has been appropriately chosen to reflect the times we are in.
I believe by now we have ascertained that the utilization of the internet has become an integral part of our everyday lives, more so that of young people.
Research from ITU and UNESCO in the 2019 report launched by the Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development Goals, posits that more than 50% of the world’s population is now online, whereas children constitute more than 30% of Internet users.
By 2022, another 1.2 billion new users would have been added to this figure, with children being the fastest-growing online demographic.
Evidently, the continuous reliance on the internet by people and nations around the world has become conspicuous over time.
2020 and the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic has further demonstrated how increasingly dependent governments, private sectors and individuals are on technology.
Indeed, reliance on ICT and the internet has led to immeasurable opportunities for citizens, especially children and young people who rely on the internet to conduct research, attend classes, study, and socialize, among others.
Ladies and Gentlemen, the theme for this year’s event – Cybersecurity in the Era of COVID-19 is 2 reflective enough considering the circumstances we find ourselves in where digital infrastructure has become the bedrock of our socio-economic development.
In view of this new reality, cybersecurity across all sectors has become imperative.
Ghana has already begun the process to secure its digital journey and a number of initiatives have been implemented over the past 3 and half years of my stewardship as the Minister with oversight responsibility over cybersecurity matters.
Ghana launched the Safer Digital Ghana campaign in 2018 to create awareness among Children, the Public, Businesses and Government.
Ghana has also ratified two important international treaties on cybercrime and cybersecurity – the African Union Convention on Cyber Security and Personal Data Protection, known as the Malabo Convention, and the Convention on Cybercrime, also known as the Budapest Convention.
Ghana has also revised its National Cybersecurity Policy & Strategy and I intend to submit this document to Cabinet for consideration before the end of the year.
My Ministry, through the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has also revised the National Child Online Protection framework which has enhanced our preventive and reactive interventions in addressing child online safety issues.
To further improve the regulatory regime for cybersecurity, my Ministry has submitted a draft Cybersecurity Bill to Cabinet for consideration.
Parliament is expected to consider this Bill before the end of the year.
Ladies and Gentlemen, our work on cybersecurity at the domestic level has won admiration and commendation from the international community.
The Council of Europe has recognized Ghana as the hub for cybercrime capacity building in the English-speaking ECOWAS region.
The World Bank has praised Ghana’s formative developments in cybersecurity and has provided support to consolidate our modest gains.
The World Economic Forum has identified Ghana for public-private sector partnership on cybersecurity.
In February 2020, Ghana hosted the 8th Annual Freedom Online Conference which brought together over 300 participants from 60 countries across the globe to engage in discussions around cybersecurity and digital rights.
With Ghana at the helm, the Conference placed emphasis on reviewing the current state of digital rights across Africa, as well as outlining strategies for improving digital rights on the continent and globally.
During this event, Ghana, together with the Government of Germany launched the Digital Inclusion statement which has been adopted by FOC countries.
Ghana has made great strides in contributing to global response to cybercrimes and we will continue to do so.
In June this year, Ghana was nominated to serve on the Independent Advisory Committee (IAC) of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT).
Ghana’s nomination to serve on the IAC of the GIFCT is another avenue to continue its sub-regional leadership role in improving 3 cybersecurity across the globe.
Ghana has also participated in a number of United Nations consultative processes on cybersecurity.
One major achievement over the last year has been the successes that have emanated as a result of the launch of the Cybercrime/Cybersecurity Incident Reporting Points of Contact (PoC).
Exactly a year ago, I launched the PoC to facilitate the reporting of cybercrime and cybersecurity incidents by the public.
Since the operationalization of the PoC, the NCSC has received countless cybercrime/cybersecurity incidents from the public.
Key among these reports are online fraud, publication of non-consensual intimate images (sextortion), online impersonation, malware attacks, online blackmail, website defacement, among others.
Cumulatively, a total of 11,545 reports have been made through the PoC between January and August 2020.
Interestingly, a significant number of people called the NCSC through the PoC to seek for guidance and direction in resolving cybersecurity incidents.
Ladies and Gentlemen, the arrest and the ongoing prosecution of the mastermind of the empressleak website is a direct result from the launch of the PoC.
As mentioned earlier, children and young people make up a significant percentage of internet users.
Hence, in spite of some of these advantages mentioned, the utilization of the internet has led to children and young people becoming more and more threatened by Child Sexual Abuse Materials (CSAM), wh ereby children are exposed to online sexual abuse through cyber grooming, cyberstalking, sexting, commercials and gaming applications.
That is why the 2020 NCSAM launch is being done in tandem with the launch of the Child Online Protection Reporting Portal.
The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) reporting portal will be used to receive reports of CSAM available on the internet.
This can enable reporting of cases to the appropriate organizations such as Facebook, to ensure that the images are taken down.
The portal, which will complement the PoC will provide a safe platform for people to report suspected child sexual abuse material s. It is my firm believe that, the National CERT will find the collaboration with the IWF beneficial in responding to cybersecurity incidents involving children.
Ladies and Gentlemen, the NCSC has adopted a hybrid approach of delivering this year’s awareness campaign by combining both physical interactions , under strict COVID-19 protocols, and the use of available virtual platforms.
A number of activities are planned for the month including the Launch of the Security Operations Centre (SOC) at the National Information Technology Agency (NITA), Cybersecurity Roundtable Forum on the Impact of COVID -19 on Ghana’s Digitalization Agenda, Cybersecurity Forum with Industry Players, Joint Freedom Online Coalition (FOC) programme on 4 Digital Inclusion, Joint engagements with SEI/Mitre through the Security Governance Initiative (SGI), Council of Europe Workshop on Cybercrime & Electronic Evidence Handling for Criminal Justice Sector , Regional Cybersecurity Capacity & Sensitisation Programme among others.
In addition, there will public engagements with children and parents on Cyber Hygiene best practices.
There will also be a live broadcast of selected events including a Cybersecurity Workshop on Mobile Money Fraud, through virtual & social platforms and media outlets.
The need for this is as a result of the wider population’s dependency on digital platform, hence the NCSC through the Ministry of Communications (MoC) will leverage on this development to intensify capacity building and awareness creation effort s. This will in turn equip the citizens with the risks associated in these perilous times and the countermeasures they can put in place.
Most importantly, the event will go on to highlight what the Government has achieved in the area of cybersecurity within the past three and half years.
I hope you carefully look through the programme outline, identify the events that fall within your scope and participate actively in them.