When Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, Ghana’s former Vice-President and one of the continent’s most prominent voices on digital transformation, addressed the London School of Economics Africa Summit last week, the room fell quiet at a single, sobering observation, Africa, he said, had missed three industrial revolutions.
Steam and coal passed the continent by. The age of electricity and mass production left Africa largely unmoved.
The computer revolution came and went without anchoring itself in African soil. Now, the fourth revolution – artificial intelligence, cloud computing, the Internet of Things is already under way and Africa is again at risk of arriving late.
But this time, Dr Bawumia argued, Ghana need not be left behind. Addressing a gathering of policymakers, scholars, innovators and students, the former vice-president presented Ghana as a country that has quietly, methodically, built the digital rails upon which an AI-powered economy can run — and called on African governments to match infrastructure investment with political courage.
“Africa does not lack talent. What we lack is deliberateness, leadership and the requisite investment to create the ecosystems where innovations and innovators thrive.”
Ghana’s Digital Foundations: A Continental Benchmark
The data Dr Bawumia presented was striking in its specificity. Ghana’s internet penetration stands at 70% — a figure that compares favourably with South Africa’s 76% and dwarfs the continent’s average of 43%, according to World Bank indicators.
Electricity access in Ghana stands at 89.5%, placing it second only to South Africa among the countries he examined.
On the Oxford Insights Government AI Readiness Index 2024, Ghana scores 43.30 out of 100 — not a perfect mark, but one that places it among the International Monetary Fund’s list of Africa’s most AI-prepared nations, alongside Kenya, Rwanda, Mauritius, Botswana and South Africa.
Dr Bawumia was candid about what underpins those numbers. Ghana’s approach, which he described as ‘holistic’, has been anchored by two transformative instruments: the Ghana Card, which has created a reliable national identity infrastructure at scale and the Digital Address System, which has given every corner of the country a locatable, usable address.
Together, they address what Bawumia identified as the most stubborn bottleneck to digital inclusion: the inability to identify citizens reliably and keep verifiable, interoperable records.
“You cannot scale digital services, let alone AI, if you cannot identify citizens reliably,” he told the summit.
The Affordability Gap: A Warning Ghana Cannot Ignore
Yet Dr Bawumia’s assessment of Ghana was not without caution. For all its comparative strengths, the former vice-president acknowledged that internet access remains financially out of reach for many Ghanaians.
According to Ghana’s National Communications Authority, the average price for one gigabyte of mobile data in 2024-2025 ranges from roughly five US cents to one dollar fifty, depending on provider and bundle. For middle and upper-income households, this is manageable. For the low-income majority, many of whom work in Ghana’s vast informal economy, regular mobile data usage remains prohibitive.
This is not a peripheral concern. It sits at the heart of whether Ghana’s digital progress translates into genuine inclusion or merely serves those already connected.
Dr Bawumia was direct: the critical policy question is not simply who is online, but ‘who is online meaningfully’ — with affordable data, adequate speeds and reliable service.
Ghana’s AI Talent Readiness score of 16.0 out of 100 — the lowest among the four countries he profiled — reinforces the point. Infrastructure without skills is a road with no vehicles on it.
The AI Imperative: Not a Luxury, a Survival Requirement
The former Vice-President’s broader argument was one that will resonate far beyond London. Digitalization, he insisted, is not a luxury that African governments can defer to some more prosperous future. It is the precondition for AI itself.
Without digitised systems producing quality data, there is no artificial intelligence that works in the public interest. ‘No data, no AI,’ he said plainly. The countries on the IMF’s AI preparedness list for Africa, Ghana among them, are without exception, also the continent’s most digitised economies.
The correlation is not coincidental.
Dr Bawumia warned that the compute-energy nexus represents a new frontier African governments must confront. The International Energy Agency projects that global data-centre electricity consumption will more than double to around 945 terawatt-hours by 2030, with AI a principal driver.
Africa currently accounts for less than one kilowatt-hour of data-centre electricity consumption per person annually, a figure that illustrates how marginal the continent remains in the global AI infrastructure map.
If that does not change, Africa risks becoming permanently dependent on external compute infrastructure, with all the sovereignty implications that entails.
Ghana in Context: Lessons from Across the Continent
The former Vice-President drew deliberate comparisons between Ghana and three other African nations to illustrate that there is no single path to AI readiness. Kenya, he argued, demonstrates the power of strategy combined with institutional capacity-building its Africa Centre of Competence for Digital and AI Skilling, developed with Microsoft and the ICT ministry, trains public servants across the continent. Rwanda, despite its relatively lower internet penetration of 34%, has distinguished itself through early policy clarity and a governance-first approach that has made it a reference point for responsible AI frameworks.
South Africa, with an AI Readiness score of 52.91 and Google Cloud’s first African cloud region now operational in Johannesburg, shows what is possible when ecosystem depth is matched by policy ambition.
Ghana’s distinct advantage, in Bawumia’s telling, is that it has built public infrastructure that others are still designing. The Ghana Card is not a pilot. The Digital Address System is operational at national scale.
The task now is governance: converting those digital rails into trusted datasets and accountable AI-enabled services, with clear privacy safeguards and transparent oversight.
“AI scales fastest where digital public infrastructure is strong, and where public trust is protected by design,” he said.
Jobs, Inequality and the Informal Economy
The question every Ghanaian household will eventually ask — what does AI mean for my job? — received a measured but sobering answer. The IMF estimates that nearly 40% of global employment is exposed to AI-driven change. In emerging market economies like Ghana, the exposure rate sits at around 40%; in low-income countries, 26%.
But the former Vice-President cautioned against interpreting these figures as a simple prediction of job losses. The more likely near-term effect, he argued, is augmentation: AI automating some tasks within jobs while freeing workers for others.
The greater risk for Ghana and its neighbours, he argued, lies not in direct automation but in the structure of African labour markets themselves.
A United Nations analysis cited in his address found that approximately 83% of African workers were in informal employment in 2024. AI will reshape livelihoods in the informal economy not primarily through robots replacing workers, but through pricing on digital platforms, access to credit, logistics efficiency, and the capacity of small businesses to operate within increasingly digital value chains. If Ghana gets those systems right, AI becomes a productivity engine. If it does not, inequality deepens.
Six Commitments for a Digital Africa
Dr Bawumia closed his address with a framework of six policy commitments he urged African governments to adopt and track. Reliable power and broadband must be treated as national infrastructure priorities.
Trustworthy data ecosystems must be built so that AI reflects African realities rather than importing foreign biases. Talent must be developed at scale, from basic digital literacy to advanced AI research.
Governments must build procurement competence to move beyond pilots to accountable, measurable deployment. Ethics must be embedded in practice through impact assessments and human oversight.
And cross-border scale must be pursued through the continental instruments already in place, the African Continental Free Trade Area’s Digital Trade Protocol and the African Union’s Continental AI Strategy, endorsed in Accra in July 2024.
That final point — the Accra endorsement — was not lost on the room. Ghana was not merely a subject of discussion. It was the site of a continental commitment. Whether Accra, Kumasi, Tamale and the communities beyond the reach of fibre-optic cables can feel the benefit of that commitment is the test that matters most.
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