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ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast – When the Africa Space Expo (ASPEX) closed in the Ivorian commercial capital last week, the headline attractions were not launch vehicles or astronauts. The gathering was deliberately pitched as something closer to a marketplace, one aimed at practical applications of orbital science: food security, climate resilience, territorial monitoring, rural connectivity and maritime security.
Organisers said the objective was to push ideas out of the demonstration phase and into deployment, convening start-ups, government research laboratories and investors in the kind of arrangement that has long been associated with more established space economies. The event also produced a crop of formal agreements. Ivory Coast became the 75th signatory to the Artemis Accords, the multinational framework governing cooperative space exploration, while Angola signed a letter of intent on space cooperation with the United Arab Emirates.
Those signatures drew the expected headlines. But the more consequential theme running through the expo's discussions was a question several delegates found increasingly difficult to sidestep: whether Africa can move from consuming space technology to designing, manufacturing and launching it at home.
Ghana offers a compact illustration of both the distance travelled and the distance still to be covered. The country's interest in science and technology infrastructure dates back to the first years after independence. In 1961, the government of President Kwame Nkrumah began work on a nuclear reactor in Accra. Two years later, an act of Parliament established the Ghana Atomic Energy Commission, charged with the peaceful application of nuclear energy.
The reactor scheme collapsed after Nkrumah was overthrown in 1966. The institution he had helped build, however, survived, and today remains the parent body of the Ghana Space Science and Technology Institute (GSSTI), the country's principal public engine for space research and application.
GSSTI director Joseph Tandoh traces the modern space programme to an unlikely entry point: a partnership with South Africa. "Ghana became a partner through South Africa," he told Al Jazeera. "Through that project, we were able to reconstruct the old satellite antenna at Kuntunse into a radio telescope."
The project involved converting a redundant 32-metre antenna at Kuntunse into a functioning radio telescope. Ghana was the first of South Africa's eight African Square Kilometre Array partner countries to finish the conversion, and the instrument was formally launched in August 2017. It gave Ghana a foothold in observational astronomy and, more practically, a demonstration that a national team could rebuild scientific infrastructure that had gone obsolete.
Policy has followed hardware. Ghana's National Space Policy won cabinet approval in 2022 and was publicly launched in 2024. In 2025, the government approved the establishment of a Ghana Space Agency, a step intended to create a dedicated national institution for the sector with a mandate broader than research.
The institutional scaffolding is now largely in place. The harder question is what Ghana builds with it — and who pays for it.
On the research side, the transition is already under way. One of the clearest examples is GEOMAIZE, a partnership between the GSSTI and VITO, the Flemish Institute for Technological Research in Belgium. Tandoh said the project showed how satellite data can be applied directly to farming, monitoring crop health and developing algorithms that classify crops. Ghana is also broadening its use of Earth observation data and artificial intelligence for crop monitoring and forecasting yields.
Forecasting, however, has proved stubborn. Tandoh said the models fell short of expected accuracy, largely because many Ghanaian farmers practice smallholder mixed cropping, while satellite-derived soil-moisture data are too coarse to distinguish the differences between adjacent small plots. A follow-up project backed by the French embassy and international research partners is now attempting to improve the estimates.
The institute's portfolio extends beyond agriculture. Satellite data have been used to track forest loss associated with mining, and the GSSTI is working with partners in Nigeria on a digital twin capable of simulating coastal erosion at Keta and Agavedzi. Japanese cooperation has supplied technical training, while French government support helped produce a draft space law now under review by the attorney general.
Tandoh framed the proposed agency as decisive. "We always say that Ghana Space Science and Technology Institute becoming an agency is to position Ghana in a way that we will not only be users of the technology but we will also contribute to designing, developing and building our own tools," he said.
Private actors face a different obstacle. Victor Tagborloh founded Galaxy Aerospace Ghana in 2020. Two years in, his team lofted a high-altitude balloon into near space and captured images of Ghanaian geography, securing clearance from national security and airport authorities. The company has since designed mini-rockets for the GSSTI, trained young people in space robotics and artificial intelligence, and campaigned for the introduction of Starlink services in Ghana in 2024.
Six years after founding, Tagborloh said, the company still has not secured an investor.
His longer-term plans are unusually concrete: a space university on 33,000 hectares (82,000 acres) of land already secured at Apam in Ghana's Central Region, and a ground station that would expand domestic capacity to monitor floods, mining activity and coastal erosion. He is now seeking investors for the ground station and for a geospatial intelligence platform, arguing that the curriculum is ready and the land is in hand — and that what is missing is the capital required to turn both into infrastructure.
Tagborloh also points to geography. Ghana's proximity to the equator, he argues, offers an advantage for launching spacecraft by reducing the fuel needed to reach orbit, a latitude advantage shared by several other African countries.
Bright Atsu Sogbey, president of the Africa Development Council and a senior research engineer at the Ghana Atomic Energy Commission, contends that even such advantages will not be captured by the private sector alone. "Borrowed technology cannot be sustainable," he told Al Jazeera, arguing that the state must be in the driver's seat, deploying the resources at its disposal. His warning defines the fault line running through Africa's space debate: enthusiasm and technical competence are abundant, while the funding, industrial policy and continent-wide coordination needed to convert one into the other remain scarce.
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