To fully appreciate this, you need to read the piece that came before it of same title.
Our conclusion was that the framework exists and the strategy exists.
This week we close the gap.
I want to do something that is apparently controversial in Ghanaian public discourse: say something genuinely good about this strategy, and then say something genuinely hard about it, in the same piece, without either one cancelling the other out. Both things are true. Both things matter. And Ghana cannot afford a conversation that only holds one of them. I don’t defer to any political party that I’m currently aware of. So please understand that there is nothing political about this. Consider it the wanderings of an insomniac’s technical mind, that appreciates the effort being made, while understanding that it’s too delicate a vision to be blurred. We’re good? We’re good.
So let’s start with the good. Because there is real meat here and it deserves to be acknowledged.
The National Strategy document is honest about risk in a way that most governments aren’t.
It names algorithmic bias. It names the danger of AI widening the very inequalities it is supposed to reduce. It names cybersecurity. It names data misuse. It does not bury these concerns in a footnote or dress them up as distant hypotheticals. It treats them as present problems – dangers even – that require potent response.
For a first-generation national AI strategy, on a continent where most governments have not yet engaged seriously with these questions, that ethical seriousness is not a small thing. It’s a key reasonGhana’s strategy is worth taking seriously even beyond Ghana’s borders.
I have heard the criticism of its being largely plagiarised – essentially a combination of different sources from different countries. My response to that is simply in a field that we are globally all trying to navigate and figure out, I’m not saying it was the best approach but I guess I understand. The important thing is ensuring that we don’t take others’ nuances and hope that they can be retrofitted.
The sectoral focus is also largely accurate. Healthcare. Agriculture. Financial services. Public administration. The creative economy. These are the same five sectors the framework I built last year identified as carrying 60% of Ghana’s AI economic upside. When an independent framework and a government strategy built from different directions arrive at the same answer, that convergence is a signal. It means the evidence is pointing somewhere and both analyses found it.
And then there is GhanaChat. Ignore the name if you can.
I want to spend a moment on it because I think it is the most underappreciated idea in the entire document. The proposal is a large language model trained on Ghanaian government data, deployed across public agencies as an alternative to foreign AI tools or LLMs. It is strategically precise in a way that most AI policy ideas strive to be. We’ve seen other regional blocks invest in same in order to unhinge themselves from the western nuances, cultural and ethical underpinnings that seem to run through the main models. GChat, ahem, takes critical pause on the avenue of cultural context, language adaptability and general localisation even in terms of look and feel, tone and aesthetic. It becomes a largely important topic based on the recent events with the American government shutting down Fable. I write about this elsewhere but it is becoming largely undeniable that nationalisation of AI is hurtling towards reality.
Right now, a civil servant in Accra who uses ChatGPT to draft a memo is feeding government information into a server in another country. That is a security exposure that most people have not thought about carefully. GhanaChat names it. And it proposes a solution that is local, sovereign, and scalable.
And then there’s the fact that, President Mahama revealed that ministers and senior officials had already undergone a national AI boot camp. AI focal persons have been designated within every ministry to lead adoption efforts. So government use is in full effect and deserves to be acknowledged.
I look forward to seeing how efficiency is improved around government following in the footsteps of Albania.
Now to the reasons why my insomnia kicks in.
The strategy makes 80+ recommendations across 8 pillars. Nearly all of them assigned to begin in 2025. Which is last year, btw for those floating in the ether.
We are approaching the midpoint of 2026.
80 simultaneous priorities is not strategy. It’s a list of nice-to-haves. Lists don’t build AI ecosystems. Even the smartest startups struggle to complete a tight engineering or business roadmap with more than 7 things at a glance. I shudder to think about a government entity sitting down with 80 items before the next election cycle reshuffles the priorities.
Pause to evaluate education, healthcare, infrastructure. We haven’t mastered the art of accomplishing one thing end to end. 80 things is… highly spiritual.
The framework I built has a specific answer to this. Front-load 70% of capital investment in the first four years. [2 now, realistically].
Concentrate initial pilots in agriculture and public administration where “sufficient” data already exists and success means meaningful impact around food security and government efficiency.
Use early wins to build the public and political confidence that sustains commitment. Important for if there’s a change in administration that progress is too tangible to throw away. Even if only because of public outlash. That way the national strategy becomes exactly that – government agnostic.
That needs to be in the RAI Authority’s first public action plan. And that plan needs to exist before the end of this year.
Having brought up the RAI Authority…
Ummm… so technically the Responsible AI Authority is assigned to coordinate all eight pillars, monitor progress across every ministry, enforce data governance, engage the private sector, connect with international governance platforms, champion ethical AI, and drive public sector adoption.
At the same time.
From day one.
And yet, close to 3 months after the strategy launch, the institution is still being referred to interchangeably as the Responsible AI Authority in the strategy document and the Responsible AI Office in the launch communications. It does not yet have a settled name. That may be a small detail. But it also manages to be a big one.
It’s precise inference of how early-stage this institution still is, and how much work remains between announcement and reality.
The fix isn’t necessarily complicated. Give the RAI Authority three specific things to achieve in year one. Three things that are ambitious enough to matter and specific enough to be measured. Publish those three things. Let the public track them. Build from there.
That is how institutional credibility is earned. That’s how to show working. Why three things? Because in addition to oversight of the two pilots mentioned above, its third mandate must be communication and education.
Ask a sample of random strangers on the street and you may find that 3 months after a presidential launch with $270 million attached, the chances are high that none of them have heard of it.
Yet, the strategy’s entire moral claim rests on inclusion. It says, repeatedly and in plain language, that this AI future is for all Ghanaians. Not just the ones in the tech ecosystem. Not just the ones in Accra. All of them. But can you include people in a future they do not know they are being included in?
Radio. Community forums… heck, I’ll take a van with a megaphone going from street to street. That’s the kind of outreach that turns a government commitment into a public expectation. And public expectations are what create the sustained pressure that keeps a ten-year strategy honest across multiple election cycles.
We need citizens who know what government has promised. That is the accountability infrastructure that makes everything else in this strategy more likely to actually happen. So where does that leave us?
The strategy is real. The ambition is right. The money appears to be on the table and the President’s credibility is attached to the outcome. That counts for a lot. Ministers have been trained. Focal persons are in place. The early signals are better than most people are giving the government credit for. Remember, I’m not a politician.
However, early signals are the beginning of the story. The distance between this strategy and its outcomes will be determined by three things. Will the RAI Authority gets a specific, narrow, publicly accountable brief in year one rather than an impossible mandate on day one?
Will 80 action items become a sequenced implementation roadmap before the year is out? H2 beckons.
Will ordinary Ghanaians come to understand what government has committed to on their behalf? In much the same way we treated “send your girl child to school”, “the value is the saaame” and Free SHS?
The framework says all three are achievable but none of them will happen by accident.
In my next piece, I will attempt to bring the two documents together. My attempt will be to build a specific, implementable picture of what the next 12 months need to look like if Ghana is going to find itself on the accelerated path rather than the base one.
That is the piece I have been building toward since I published the framework last year. Come back for it
Until next time,
-Spyda