Ghana Post's Diversification Plans
The Ghana Post Company Limited is positioning itself to provide a new image and direction of postal services on the African continent in the face of serious technological developments and competition.
As the new Chair of the Pan African Postal Union (PAPU), elected at the 25th Ordinary Session of the Administrative Council of the Union recently held in Accra, Ghana Post is now diversifying its services, and would provide the leadership to reform the African postal service to ensure its survival.
Three top Management Personnel have told the Ghana News Agency (GNA) that ICT was going to be the main target in repositioning postal services in Africa.
Mr. Kofi Dua-Adonteng, Managing Director; Mr. Samuel Asare, Deputy Managing Director (Finance and Administration); and Mr. Seth Obeng, General Manager (Financial Services) painted a bright future for the African postal services as the countries reformed the services to beat the impact of the threat of ICT.
Mr. Dua-Adonteng said, in spite of the threats from the technological advances, Africa’s postal services had a tremendous future. He said the lack of finance was the biggest handicap of the postal administration in Africa, and the competition, due to technological development in the global economic order had brought the postal sector under intense pressure.
However, postal systems would survive because that is the main transporter of bulk mail.
Mr. Dua-Adonteng said Ghana Post had had to diversify to other lines of business to sustain itself since it weaned itself from government subvention in 1999.
Currently Ghana Post has 330 main post offices and 700 agencies countrywide.
Mr. Dua-Adonteng said as the first and traditional provider of mail services, Ghana Post understood the service better to provide hybrids and species of electronic mail, and would soon introduce a tracking and tracing system for the expedited mail service (EMS) for customers to know through an electronic system where their hard and bulk mails were as they went through transit.
With Ho, the Volta Regional capital as a starting point, the company had began operating Internet café’s, which would be replicated in all the 10 regions of Ghana.
Mr. Dua-Adonteng said the company would rely on broadband to provide electronic mail service in areas that did not have telephone lines.
He identified financial services as a central component for the survival of postal services, and announced that Ghana Post was running as a subagent of the Agricultural Development Bank to do international money transfer business.
Also the Post Office Savings Bank would soon be operational, to encourage savings mobilisation.
Mr. Samuel Asare, Deputy Managing Director (Finance and Administration) said feasibility studies for the Bank, which would exist as a separate entity, with its own management, had been completed.
For starters, the Bank of Ghana had demanded 70 billion cedis, and the company was looking for alliances to provide the leverage for the needed investment and capital structure.
The head office of the bank would be in Accra, and for the beginning, the post offices would lease space for the operation of the Bank.
Mr. Obeng, the Financial Services Manager, who spoke on the electronic money transfer, Instant Money Transfer (IMT), said there were 163 IMT centres out of the 330 post offices, to enhance easy floating of monies, even to the remotest part of the country.
