The Akyem Oda District office of the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) will at the end of this month, begin its pre-payment metering project in its catchment area.
This is part of efforts to improve the revenue of the power distributing company as consumers would pay for the power to be used, instead of paying after consumption as they presently do.
The Oda District Manager of ECG, Maxwell Essel, announced this when he led the staff of Oda District for a float through the principal streets of Oda last Friday, to sensitise the people to its digitisation system also known as online payment or cashless system.
He indicated that, the installation of prepaid meters would begin with the staff of the ECG and all stakeholders before the general public would be brought on board.
Benefits
The Oda District ECG Manager said prepaid was the modern way of managing electricity usage as customers decided their own consumption and it also would help avert the arguments that often came up over irregularities in the billing system between customers and the company.
He said the prepaid system would also prevent customers from facing disconnection or payment of reconnection fees.
Mr Essel stated that with the prepaid system, landlords were not left out with debts when tenants moved out of their houses.
Commercials users, he said, were able to see in real time what amount of money they had spent on a job, to give an idea of how much they were to charge their customers.
Online payment
Throwing more light on the online payment of tariffs, Mr Essel said the ECG had gone cashless and thus did not receive cash payment in its offices all over the country.
He said the digital interventions included the enhanced ECG customers APP and the cashless system.
Mr Essel said under the cashless system, there was no need for customers to pay physical money to the ECG offices but should rather use their mobile phones to make payments by downloading the ECG power APP from play store or APP store, then make payments by registering one’s account on postpaid meters.
He said in case of customers not using smart phones, they had the option of dialing *226# and follow the prompt to add phone numbers to make the payment.
Receipts
Mr Essel explained that once payment was done, customers could see their receipts on their phones in case of smart phones, adding that for non-smart phone users, they would receive text messages notifying payments.
“If customers still want to print their receipts, they can go to any nearest ECG operational office and mention their phone and receipts numbers for the officials to print the receipts for them,” Mr Essel said.
He advised customers to make part payments weekly and fortnightly of their electricity tariffs.
The field investigator of ECG and coordinator of the programme, Gabriel Afriyie, advised customers to use the new APP to pay their bills promptly to continue to enjoy uninterrupted power supply.
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