In early May, GitHub and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the UN agency focused on poverty reduction and sustainable development, spent a week in Ghana running interviews and workshops to assess the government's readiness for open source adoption and governance. The mission was part of OSPORA, a UN initiative funded by the French government to support public administrations moving to open source software. The assessment was timed to take advantage of a pivotal moment.
"There's a very important policy window right now within Ghana, with a long list of regulations under review, creating an opportunity to embed open source language directly into them” elaborates Laura Hildebrandt (Digital Specialist , Digital Transformation Journeys, UNDP)
Ghana is currently undergoing a digital transformation initiative and ICT legislative reform. The deliberate ICT regulatory revision aims to advance numerous laws, in areas like cybersecurity, data protection, electronic communications, data exchange and emerging technologies. Some are new legislation, while others replace existing ones.
Internal Advocates and Coordination struggles: Assessment Findings
The mission consisted of focused sessions with the Ghana Investment Fund for Electronic Communications (GIFEC), the Ministry of Communications agency responsible for expanding phone access to communities with poor or no coverage, and the National Information Technology Agency (NITA), the ICT policy implementing arm of the Ministry of Communication, Digital Technology and Innovation (MoCDTI).
UNDP and Github also ran focus groups with IT managers and open source developers. A full-day workshop brought together government, academia, civil society, and private sector representatives. Participants included senior MoCDTI officials, responsible for national telecommunications infrastructure and digital governance, and representatives from the Kofi Annan-India Center of Excellence (AITI-KACE), Ghana's first Advanced Information Technology Institute. AITI-KACE is also leading the country's digital transformation and legislative reform process.
Bevan Agard (Open Source Project Officer, UNDP Multi-Country Office Trinidad and Tobago, UNDP) describes the role of the UNDP during the workshops as a convener rather than technical advisor: “what we can do is help to bring organisations together and talk to each other, to broker some of the relationships that need to happen."
The assessments covered technical readiness as well as institutional structure, policies, procurement practices, legal frameworks and political will. The results from this week were nuanced.
On the one hand, Ghana has political commitment to digitalisation. A key strength is the support from officials within the government, who are advocating for open source adoption. These advocates have almost a decade of open source delivery experience, and see open source as an essential means to building a more digitally sovereign future. They also recognise a close link between open source adoption and Ghana's ambition to grow its national digital economy and local technology abilities. The country also has a motivated and growing local tech community.
On the other hand, the main challenge is the lack of a clear, centralised open source policy. This causes coordination difficulties between the National Industrial Training Agency, which sets standards for the quality and efficiency of industrial training, and the individual ministries and under-resourced IT teams. Moreover, resistance to change tends to maintain a status quo especially when agencies have built up long relationships with existing vendors and set procurement processes around them.
Hildebrandt explained the immediate priority after the week of interviews: finalising and signing off the assessment report with the government, which has already been presented to the minister. Among other points, the report recommends establishing an OSPO.
Utilising Global Open Source Lessons for a Local Context
“The mission grew out of a three-year EU-funded project to set up an OSPO in Trinidad and Tobago. Contacts within the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, then led to additional funding for open source readiness assessments elsewhere” explains UNDP’s Digital Public Infrastructure Manager Benjamin Bertelsen. Ghana was chosen from around 25 applications across 20 countries from the original OSPO programme.
"Europe not only funded this work, but provided some very clear technical guidance." Hildebrandt noted, while explaining that the UNDP team referenced Schleswig-Holstein's policy documents directly in the Ghana workshop. Agard added that the UN's approach was to learn from European public administrations that had successfully adopted open source, drawing on proven European models and applying them to the local context rather than reinventing the wheel.