From Policy to Payload: Africa's Push to Build Its Own Space Capability

ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast — When the Africa Space Expo (ASPEX) closed in the Ivorian commercial capital last week, organisers were careful about what it had not been billed as. This was not a spectacle of rockets and astronauts. It was staged instead as a working marketplace, a place where commercial start-ups, government research labs and prospective investors could meet around a single proposition: that space technology has already moved past the demonstration phase and is ready for deployment in African agriculture, climate resilience, border and territorial monitoring, rural connectivity and maritime security.

The event also produced paperwork. Ivory Coast signed the Artemis Accords, making it the 75th signatory to the US-led framework on space exploration and development, while Angola signed a letter of intent on space cooperation with the United Arab Emirates. For a continent whose space sector is often discussed in the language of ambition rather than accomplishment, the diplomatic momentum was notable.

But the agreements were not the main story. The expo forced into the open a question that is becoming difficult to sidestep: can Africa move from consuming space technology to building a meaningful share of it itself?

Ghana offers an unusually clear illustration of both the progress and the gap — and of how far back the current scramble for "space" roots sit in the country's post-independence state-building.

In 1961, the government of President Kwame Nkrumah initiated a nuclear reactor project in Accra. Two years later, an act of Parliament established the Ghana Atomic Energy Commission with a mandate covering the peaceful applications of nuclear energy. The reactor was shelved after Nkrumah's overthrow in 1966, but the commission survived. It is today the parent body of the Ghana Space Science and Technology Institute (GSSTI), the country's principal public research outfit for space and nuclear applications.

"The institutional framework is taking shape," as Joseph Tandoh, the GSSTI's director, puts it. He traces Ghana's modern space programme to a partnership with South Africa. Through the Square Kilometre Array cooperation, Ghana was able to reconstruct a redundant 32-metre (105ft) satellite antenna at Kuntunse into a working radio telescope. Ghana was the first of South Africa's eight African SKA partner countries to complete such a conversion, and the telescope was commissioned in August 2017. It was, in effect, a first lesson in repurposing existing national hardware into scientific infrastructure.

Policy has since moved at a faster clip than hardware. Ghana's National Space Policy was approved by cabinet in 2022 and formally launched in 2024, and in 2025 the government approved the establishment of a Ghana Space Agency — a process intended to create a dedicated national institution for the sector. Tandoh's stated ambition is institutional as much as technical: to position Ghana "so that we will not only be users of the technology but we will also contribute to designing, developing and building our own tools."

On the ground, the most tangible work is in Earth observation. GEOMAIZE, a partnership between the GSSTI and VITO, the Flemish Institute for Technological Research in Belgium, has demonstrated how satellite data can be applied directly to Ghanaian agriculture — monitoring crop health and developing algorithms to classify crops. Ghana is expanding its use of Earth observation data combined with artificial intelligence for crop monitoring and yield forecasting.

The forecasting, however, is where realism bites. Tandoh said the model's accuracy fell short of expectations, largely because many Ghanaian farmers practise smallholder mixed cropping, which makes satellite-derived soil-moisture data too coarse to resolve differences between individual small plots. A follow-up project backed by the French embassy and international research partners is now working to improve the estimates. The episode captures the central difficulty of transferring precision space technology to agricultural systems shaped by small, fragmented holdings.

The institute's portfolio is broader. It has used satellite data to track forest loss linked to mining operations, and is working with partners in Nigeria on a digital twin that simulates coastal erosion at Keta and Agavedzi — two of the country's most exposed coastline communities. Japanese cooperation has provided technical training, while French government support helped produce a draft space law now under review by the attorney general.

Against this public-institution backdrop, the private sector story is one of talent and impatience. Victor Tagborloh founded Galaxy Aerospace Ghana in 2020. Two years in, his team flew a high-altitude balloon into near space, capturing images of Ghanaian geography with 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 pushed for the introduction of Starlink in Ghana in 2024.

Six years on, Tagborloh said, the company still has not secured an investor.

His longer-term plans are substantial. Galaxy has secured 33,000 hectares (82,000 acres) at Apam in Ghana's Central Region for a proposed space university, and wants to build a ground station that would give Ghana independent capacity to monitor floods, mining activity and coastal erosion. It is seeking investors for both the station and a geospatial intelligence platform. The curriculum, he said, is ready and the land is available. What is missing is the capital to turn the plans into infrastructure.

Tagborloh also argues that Ghana's position near the equator is a strategic asset. Launching from lower latitudes can reduce the fuel required to reach orbit, a geography Ghana shares with several other African countries — a potential basis for pooled continental capability rather than duplicated national efforts.

Skeptics of the pure start-up route question whether private enterprise can carry the sector at all. 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 alone. "Borrowed technology cannot be sustainable," he said, arguing that the state must be in the driver's seat, drawing on the natural resources the continent already possesses.

That debate — state-led build-out versus private-led commercialisation — is likely to define what follows Abidjan. The expo's organisers say their aim was to move ideas from demonstration to deployment, and the Ivory Coast and Angola signings show governments moving on the diplomatic stage at the same time. The unresolved question is whether the money, the engineering capacity and the industrial policy can keep pace.