The exercise, which is the first phase, started yesterday and is expected to be carried out in six months.

Personnel for the activity known as the National Property Address Tagging Project will be grouped into a workforce of 50 each in 25 separate teams and spread across 254 districts.

Press conference

At a press briefing in Accra yesterday to announce the start of the exercise, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of NABCO, Dr Ibrahim Anyars, said the recruits would each emboss 21 houses per day at no cost to property owners.

He said NABCO was the central coordinator of the project and would engage and supervise the exercise with personnel from the Physical Planning Department of the metropolitan, municipal and district assemblies (MMDAs) and would ensure that by the close of this year (December 2019) every house would be tagged.

Dr Anyars said the address plates to be embossed on the houses would display the property’s number, street name and the property’s Ghana Post digital address. 

The digital address system has the intention of improving access to ambulance services, emergency health care, enhanced access to security services and, ultimately, emergency services in the country.

The system is also expected to facilitate e-Commerce activities, access to financial services and boost revenue mobilisation for MMDAs and the country at large.

Dr Anyars said NABCO and the National Union of Ghana Students (NUGS) would engage in some publicity to alert the public to the exercise.

Responding to a question on duplication, Dr Anyars said properties with several tenants having identical addressing systems would be avoided because every digital address was unique.

 “The principle is to have the most used entry point to generate the address and that gives you the unique location. This will still give you the utility that we want to achieve so that you can call for any kind of service and so there is not a conflict in terms of duplication,” he said.

Furthermore, the NABCO CEO said the country was moving away from the present haphazard block house numbering system to the sequential house numbering system and relying on the street lines and street name database to generate the addresses.

Background

The government in 2011 issued a naming and property addressing policy to guide all MMDAs and further issued a directive in 2013 requiring MMDAs to comply with the policy.

Prior to the start of the exercise yesterday, the Vice-President, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, met with stakeholders to ensure a successful take-off of the exercise and easy identification of properties using the digital property address system.