Ghana ICT

Long one of the fastest-growing and most dynamic parts of the economy, Ghana’s telecoms sector is undergoing a transition towards increased data activity. Rising costs in the 27.9m-person country have forced operators to raise tariffs and intensify their efforts to develop growing streams of revenue, particularly data-intensive services. As...

As operators have looked to diversify product offerings in recent years, they have shown increasing interest in mobile banking and mobile money. Mobile money has become a way in which technology can allow frontier markets to reduce development disparities and improve financial inclusion. The most successful illustration of this is the M-Pesa...

From a near-standing start, Ghana’s ICT sector has developed strongly since the beginning of the century, with internet take-up among citizens and businesses growing, international broadband connectivity expanding rapidly, and private sector investment on the rise.

Across the continent, there is a trend towards sharing and outsourcing network infrastructure, which is capital intensive to build and costly to maintain. Ghana has been a leader in this movement, with major deals struck between mobile operators and infrastructure operators over the past five years.

Ghana is a leader in African telecoms market liberalisation, has a relatively high level of mobile penetration and is a regional centre for submarine cables. However, this has not necessarily been reflected by the use of ICT in the day-to-day lives of Ghanaians or in ordinary businesses. For Daniel Glover, general manager of Tecno, the issue...

Mobile money is a growing segment in Ghana, having been launched in 2009, later than in some African countries. Transactions worth a total of GHC11.6bn ($3.22bn) were made in 2014, up from GHC2.4bn ($666m) in 2013, according to Bank of Ghana (BoG) statistics. The number of transactions soared from 36.8m in 2013 to 106.4m in 2014, while the...