Ghana’s digital transformation agenda risks yielding limited economic returns unless technology developers place the realities, needs and constraints of users at the heart of innovation, Professor Isaac Wiafe of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Ghana has cautioned.
Prof. Wiafe said technological sophistication alone was insufficient to generate economic value, arguing that the country’s challenge was increasingly shifting from a shortage of digital innovation to a gap between innovation, adoption and productive economic use.
Delivering the keynote address at the closing and Open-Source Guide launch and awards ceremony of the User Testing and Support for the Adaptation of Digital Solutions for Informal Micro-Entrepreneurs project in Accra, he said digital transformation must be designed around people rather than expecting people to adjust to technology.
He described the principle as “Design for Change” and challenged technology developers to first understand the people whose behaviour their interventions sought to influence.
“When a technological intervention fails to achieve its intended outcome, why do we readily assume that the human being must change to fit the technology?” he asked.
Prof. Wiafe said every technological system contained assumptions about its users, including their capabilities, motivations, language, literacy, economic circumstances, technological experience and social environment.
When those assumptions were wrong, he said, a system could be technically sound while failing in practical use.
“Technology can therefore be technically successful but socially ineffective; highly innovative but practically irrelevant,” he said.
He explained that human-centred design went beyond interface features such as colours and buttons, requiring developers to understand users and their contexts, involve them in development, test proposed solutions and continuously improve them based on evidence.
He contrasted the conventional approach of “Build → Launch → Train → Hope for adoption” with a human-centred process of “Understand → Co-design → Prototype → Test → Learn → Adapt.”
According to him, the difference was critical because human-centred design allowed users’ circumstances to influence the product and even define the problem being addressed.
Prof. Wiafe said the economic value of digital innovation could be understood through the relationship between technological capability, adoption and productive use.
“Technological sophistication alone does not generate economic value,” he stressed, noting that a highly advanced solution that nobody adopted would produce little or no economic benefit.
He identified four major economic benefits of human-centred design: reducing the cost of failed innovation, improving productivity, promoting economic inclusion and strengthening trust.
Poor usability, he said, imposed real economic costs because every unnecessary step, confusing instruction or failed transaction consumed time that informal entrepreneurs could otherwise spend serving customers, producing, procuring or selling.
“For a micro-entrepreneur, time spent trying to understand a poorly designed system is time diverted from customers, production, procurement or sales. In this sense: Usability becomes productivity,” he said.
He also warned that digital systems could exclude people through assumptions about language, literacy, disability, gender, affordability, connectivity and access to appropriate devices.
Prof. Wiafe said the project demonstrated the value of challenging those assumptions by adapting 15 existing digital solutions and supporting the development of 12 new prototypes based on identified user needs.
He argued that Ghana, where innovation resources were limited, could not afford to spend scarce capital developing sophisticated technologies for poorly defined problems.
“Ghana cannot afford to invest scarce capital in technically sophisticated solutions for problems that have been incorrectly defined,” he said.
He therefore urged developers and policymakers to ask whether users had been properly understood, whether their environments and existing practices had been considered, and whether they had participated meaningfully in developing the solutions.
He concluded that the ultimate objective of digital transformation should not be to force people to conform to technological systems, but to create systems that respond intelligently to human realities.
“When we achieve this, we improve the transition from innovation to adoption, from adoption to productive use, and from productive use to inclusive economic value,” Prof. Wiafe said.
The event was organized by the GIZ under its Digital Transformation for Sustainable Development in Ghana (DTEG) initiative in collaboration with GFA Consulting Group.
