The system christened, e-payment Management and Sanitation Monitoring System is to among other things generate real time data for tracking revenue collected in the form of business operating permits and property rates among others.

It also has a waste collection monitoring system which would provide quantitative information on the operations of the Waste Collection Service Providers at household levels in the various communities within the Ga Central Municipality.

At the launch of the system on Tuesday, March 13, 2018, the Ga Central  Municipal Chief Executive, Dr. Emmanuel Lamptey, said human interference in their revenue generation has affected the Assembly’s internally generated funds badly hence the introduction of the e-payment initiative.

Dr. Lamptey also added that, the system will enable the Assembly register every household compulsorily for waste collection, a move he said will effectively improve waste collection in the municipality.

“As part of the implementation strategy, the Assembly will hire the services of an independent IT specialist who will periodically monitor the entire electronic system to prevent and external human interferences.”

He added that, “the system will generate monthly reports for the study and discussion by management and the Assembly for informed decisions.”

On the cost of the project, the elated Ga Central MCE said, “we are still buying the full components for the system. We have spent less than fifty thousand US dollars. We own the hardware and the software, and we are not giving it to other software developers.”

“This project is more than value for money. If you consider the leakages alone, the about sixty percent leakages identified in the Assembly, this project is highly rated. Quick analysis of the revenues show that we were able to raise about 2.7 Million Ghana cedis last year, which was 45 % improvement in the 2016 revenue. If you do the math for 60% of GHc2.7 million and you subtract the 50,000 dollars from it you will see that the gains are huge.”

Elaborating on how the system can effectively manage solid waste, the MCE indicated that every household will be registered compulsorily.

“The moment you register for property rate, automatically you are registered for the waste collection. Our waste collection service providers will be given this Point of Sale Device so when they pick your waste the card will be swiped on the device for the information to get to our system. So we will know the household the waste collectors have gone to collect the refuse. The agreement with the waste collectors is for them to collect it twice in a week, so we are able to monitor,” he added.

The Greater Accra Regional Minister, Ishmael Ashittey, who was the Special Guest of Honour lauded the initiative, saying it will go a long way to improve local revenue mobilization and also eliminate some irregularities in the manual collection of revenues.

He also charged technocrats at the Assembly to ensure maximum utilization of the system in order to increase revenue for the assembly.

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By: Kojo Agyeman/citifmonline.com/Ghana

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