Hendra Wijaya
ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast — The Africa Space Expo (ASPEX), which wrapped up in the Ivorian economic capital last week, was deliberately built as something other than a rocket-and-astronaut spectacle. Organisers billed it as a working marketplace, a place where space technology meets the everyday problems African governments are trying to solve: food security, climate resilience, territorial monitoring, rural connectivity and maritime security. Start-ups, research laboratories and investors were brought together under one roof with a single aim — moving ideas out of the demonstration phase and into actual deployment.
The event also produced tangible diplomatic results. Ivory Coast signed the Artemis Accords, becoming the 75th signatory to the US-backed agreement on space exploration and development. Angola, in a separate move, signed a letter of intent on space cooperation with the United Arab Emirates. Together, the two signings underline how seriously African states are now treating space as sovereign business rather than a distant scientific concern.
Yet the more consequential question raised by the expo is one that refuses to be scheduled on a conference programme: can Africa graduate from *using* space technology to actually *building* it? Ghana, which sent one of the expo's larger delegations, offers a compact case study of both the distance travelled and the distance still to go.
Ghana's interest in space and nuclear science reaches back to the first years of independence. In 1961, the government of President Kwame Nkrumah began work on a nuclear reactor project in Accra. Two years later, Parliament enacted the law establishing the Ghana Atomic Energy Commission, with a mandate covering the peaceful uses of nuclear energy. The reactor itself was abandoned after Nkrumah was overthrown in 1966, but the commission survived — and today remains the parent body of the Ghana Space Science and Technology Institute (GSSTI), the country central to its space ambitions.
Its most visible early win came through the sky rather than the launch pad. Director Joseph Tandoh said Ghana entered the field through a partnership with South Africa, which allowed the institute to rebuild a decommissioned satellite antenna at Kuntunse into a working radio telescope. The 32-metre (105ft) dish was converted in record time: Ghana was the first of South Africa's eight African Square Kilometre Array partner nations to finish the job, and the telescope went live in August 2017.
Policy has since moved at a similar pace. The 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 a sector that had previously been governed through a research institute.
On the ground, the practical work is already substantial. GEOMAIZE, a partnership between the GSSTI and VITO, the Flemish Institute for Technological Research in Belgium, has shown how satellite imagery can be applied directly to Ghanaian farming — monitoring crop health and building algorithms that can classify different crops. The institute is also widening its use of Earth observation data and artificial intelligence to forecast harvests.
Forecasting, however, has proven stubbornly hard. Tandoh said the yield model's accuracy fell short of expectations, largely because Ghanaian farmers practice smallholder mixed cropping, while satellite-derived soil-moisture data are too coarse to distinguish one small plot from the next. A follow-up project, backed by the French embassy and international research partners, is now trying to close that accuracy gap.
Other applications are moving forward in parallel. The GSSTI has used satellite data to track forest loss driven by illegal mining, and is working with counterparts in Nigeria on a "digital twin" model capable of simulating coastal erosion at Keta and Agavedzi. Japan has supplied technical training, while French support helped produce a draft space law now under review by the attorney general. At the expo, Galaxy Aerospace Ghana showed a crop-health monitoring app built for food-security purposes that is still in testing.
Tandoh argues the new agency is the pivot point for all of it. "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.
Financing is the obstacle that keeps reappearing. Victor Tagborloh founded Galaxy Aerospace Ghana in 2020 and, two years in, flew a high-altitude balloon into near space, photographing Ghanaian terrain after securing clearance from national security and aviation authorities. Since then the company has designed mini-rockets for the GSSTI, trained young people in space robotics and AI, and campaigned for the introduction of Starlink in Ghana in 2024.
Six years after founding, Tagborloh said, the company still has not secured an investor. Its longer-term plans include a space university on 33,000 hectares (82,000 acres) of land it has secured at Apam in the Central Region, and a ground station that would give Ghana domestic capacity to monitor floods, mining activity and coastal erosion. He said the curriculum is written and the land is in hand; what is missing is the capital to convert both into infrastructure.
Tagborloh also points to geography. Ghana's proximity to the equator could, he argues, cut the fuel needed to reach orbit — an advantage several other African countries share. His ambition, though, extends beyond launch: he wants Ghana to build the infrastructure and institutional expertise that underpin space capability in the first place.
Whether that can happen without heavy public commitment is disputed. Bright Atsu Sogbey, president of the Africa Development Council and a senior research engineer at the Ghana Atomic Energy Commission, said the private sector cannot build the industry on its own. "Borrowed technology cannot be sustainable," Sogbey told Al Jazeera, arguing that the state must take the wheel, deploying the natural resources at its disposal to ensure the continent's space ambitions are matched by domestic capability.
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