Ghana urges ITU to target last-mile connectivity as half of Africa stays offline

More than half of Africa's population remained offline in 2026, according to Ghana's Minister for Communication, Digital Technology and Innovations, Samuel Nartey George, who used the ITU Plenipotentiary Conference in Doha to demand stronger international cooperation and investment to close the gap.

George delivered the figure while addressing PP-26, the International Telecommunication Union's 2026 Plenipotentiary Conference in Qatar's capital. He framed the statistic as the core justification for practical interventions to extend digital connectivity to underserved communities, rather than declarations of principle.

His speech, reported by the Ghana News Agency, put concrete national programmes behind the rhetoric. For R&D and digital-infrastructure managers watching African markets, three commitments stand out.

What is Ghana actually building?

The first is a National AI Compute Centre. George said the facility will support research, innovation and enterprise, and will advance what he called responsible, ethical and inclusive artificial intelligence. He offered no budget figure, timeline or compute capacity in the address, so procurement scale remains unknown.

The second is the One Million Coders initiative, a skills programme designed to equip one million people with the digital capabilities needed to participate in the evolving digital economy. As with the compute centre, the minister did not specify funding levels, delivery partners or current enrolment, leaving the target a stated ambition rather than a measured result.

The third concerns cybersecurity, where Ghana claims an independently benchmarked position: Tier 1 status in the ITU's Global Cybersecurity Index. George said Ghana stands ready to share its experience in establishing Computer Emergency Response Teams and Child Online Protection protocols with other ITU member states — an offer that positions the country as a technical donor, not only a recipient.

What does Ghana want from the ITU?

George set out demands for the ITU's next Strategic Plan, covering 2027 to 2030. He called for the plan to focus on measurable outcomes, singling out two priorities:

• Investment in last-mile connectivity, the highest-cost segment of network rollout and the segment where Africa's offline majority lives
• Equitable access to spectrum and satellite orbits, the finite radio resources allocated through ITU processes where African states historically hold less negotiating weight

The push for measurable outcomes is a direct challenge to how the ITU accounts for its work. It implies Ghana will judge the 2027–2030 plan by deployment and access metrics rather than activity counts.

Why the re-election bids matter

Alongside policy positions, George made two institutional appeals. He asked for support for Ghana's re-election to the ITU Council for Region D, the body's governing layer between plenipotentiary conferences. He also sought re-election for Edmund Yirenkyi Fianko, Director-General of Ghana's National Communications Authority, to the Radio Regulations Board, the committee that oversees application of the international radio treaty governing spectrum and orbit assignments.

Both seats give Ghana influence over exactly the resource-allocation questions — spectrum and orbital slots — that George flagged as equity issues in his speech.

The open questions

The address gives R&D managers a clear signal of Ghana's digital policy direction: domestic compute capacity, mass coding training and a cybersecurity posture the ITU itself rates at Tier 1. What it does not yet give is cost, schedule or performance data for the two flagship programmes. The offline-population figure is presented without a named measurement source or margin, and the minister's office has not published the underlying dataset.

Ghana's proposals for the 2027–2030 ITU Strategic Plan will be tested in the PP-26 negotiations now under way in Doha, where the re-election votes for the ITU Council and the Radio Regulations Board will give an early read on the country's standing among member states.