The Ghanaian government has made digital transformation a major axis of its development policy. To achieve its objectives, Accra wants to extend telecom services, particularly high-speed Internet, to the entire population.
70% of the Ghanaian population does not have access to high-speed Internet. This was revealed by Ursula Owusu-Ekuful (photo, center), Minister of Communications and Digitalization, during the 2023 annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank in Marrakech, Morocco.
The minister explained that funding was a significant barrier to expanding broadband internet coverage across the country. “ If you look at the fact that since we started building the 4G network in our country eight years ago, we only have 30% of our population that has access to broadband. We still have a long way to go ,” she said.
This is why the Ghanaian government recently decided to create a neutral shared infrastructure company to provide 4G and 5G services nationwide. The executive also approved the country’s connection to the 2Africa submarine fiber optic cable from the eponymous consortium led by the American company Meta.
“ As our economies struggle and become increasingly dependent on the international capital market, we are finding other ways to finance our infrastructure development and are considering public-private partnership initiatives,” added Ms. Owusu- Ekuful.
As a reminder, Ghana has 22.75 million mobile Internet subscriptions and about 104,000 fixed data subscriptions, according to the latest statistics from the National Communications Authority (NCA). The same source indicates that the number of 4G data users is 9.25 million for a population of 31.82 million.