Ghana’s Tech Boom: Meet the Visionaries Behind the Country’s Innovatio

Ghana's ICT sector has recorded 20.2 per cent growth in 2025, making it one of the fastest-growing areas of the economy. However, despite this remarkable transformation, a question remains largely unasked: who is actually building the technology that Ghana is spending billions of cedis to acquire?

The Digital Ownership Dilemma

Ghana has made significant strides in digitalisation, with government services, banks, hospitals, and universities increasingly adopting online platforms. However, beneath this impressive transformation lies a pressing concern: whether Ghana's digital transformation is simultaneously building Ghanaian technological capability, companies, intellectual property, and jobs.

According to a recent statement, "The next battle is not digitalisation. It is digital ownership." The statement warns that Ghana risks becoming a highly digitised country without becoming a technologically productive one if it fails to address this issue.

Measuring the Digital Economy

Ghana's Information and Communication sector is demonstrating extraordinary growth, with GDP growth in the sector reaching 20.2 per cent in 2025. However, the country has a serious measurement problem when it comes to understanding how much of that value is being created by Ghanaian software developers, technology companies, and locally owned intellectual property.

The statement notes that while Ghana can estimate the size and growth of the broader ICT sector, it does not routinely publish a national figure showing the annual economic value generated specifically by Ghanaian software developers and locally developed digital products.

Creating a Technologically Productive Economy

Ghana has no shortage of technological talent, with young Ghanaians building applications, payment systems, health platforms, education technologies, agricultural solutions, and enterprise software across universities, technical universities, technology hubs, fintech companies, startups, and independent developer communities.

However, talent alone does not create technological sovereignty. Developers need markets, startups need customers, technology companies need access to capital, researchers need opportunities to commercialise their innovations, and government needs procurement policies that can convert public expenditure into domestic technological capacity.

Government Digitalisation as Industrial Policy

Ghana's digitalisation programme should not be treated simply as an ICT programme, but rather as industrial policy for the digital age. Every major government technology investment should have a measurable local-capacity component, including local software development, technology-transfer programmes, training and certification of Ghanaian engineers, local technical documentation, Ghana-based maintenance and support, internships and apprenticeships, partnerships with Ghanaian universities and technical universities, and progressive transfer of technical responsibilities to local companies.

The objective should not be to exclude foreign companies, but to ensure that foreign investment leaves Ghana more technologically capable than it found it.

A National Digital Production Account

Ghana cannot manage what it does not measure. The country needs to develop a National Digital Production Account to measure the economic value generated by Ghanaian software developers and locally developed digital products. This could include metrics such as the number of software developers and digital professionals, annual revenue of Ghanaian software companies, and value of locally developed software.

By developing a comprehensive Local Digital Content and Software Development Framework, Ghana can establish measurable targets for local participation in public-sector digital procurement and create a more meaningful definition of local content.

Source: JOY