Nana Osei Afrifa, Chief Executive Officer for VOKACOM, the company that designed the National Digital Property Addressing System, has refuted suggestions that the Ghana government or his company will have to pay tech giant, Google, an amount of $400,000 every year to use their systems integrated into the addressing system to be used in Ghana.
“Google will not charge $400,000 every year…it was a misrepresentation of what was said. We have been contracted to do this in the first year. The first year of this, we as VOKACOM, as part of our bid put in that ‘Ghana please give us GHS9.9million to do this for you. When you give us that money, we will use it for a bunch of things. One of them will be to pay for licence fees’,” he said.
The payment issue first came up on Friday, 27 October when the Managing Director of GhanaPost GPS, James Kwofie, gave the media a breakdown of the $2.5million cost of the app at a press conference.
According to him: “In terms of the cost, what is being paid for is the back-end solution, data analytics, hardware i.e. the firewalls and servers, Google licence, marketing and publicity as well as technical support, and GHS1.7 million VAT which goes back to the government. Contrary to popular believe, Google charges when you use their systems for local purposes or commercial activities. The Google licence fee at the moment is $400,000 per year – that is the enterprise package.”
Source: GhanaWeb
