Private legal practitioner Ace Ankomah has called on the Ghanaian government to transform the nation’s scientific landscape by making technology and innovation both financially rewarding and socially prestigious.
Speaking at the closing session of the three-day African Prosperity Dialogues in Accra, Mr Ankomah lamented the systemic failure to implement homegrown research, which he said allows preventable problems to persist unchecked.
According to him, the root of the problem lies in the burial of revolutionary ideas within tertiary institutions. While Ghanaian students are producing solutions to the country’s most pressing technological and engineering challenges, these innovations often remain confined to university archives.
“I believe that the solutions to most of our science, technology, and engineering problems already exist, generated and germinated by our brilliant students, but buried in university archives in theses and research projects that identified real challenges and proposed workable answers,” Mr Ankomah said.
To bridge the gap between academia and industry, he proposed a policy shift away from traditional grant-based research toward a commercially viable enterprise model, urging the government to move from being a passive observer to an active facilitator of innovation.
His recommendations for advancing innovation include:
- Campus-Based Incubators: Establish hubs on every university campus to connect student researchers, industrial players, and venture capital.
- Intellectual Property Protection: Launch a nationwide drive to patent local innovations, ensuring Ghanaian intellectual property is legally protected and commercially exploitable.
- Industrial Alignment: Direct policies to require both state and private sectors to prioritize local research for engineering solutions.
- Institutional Equipping: Provide modern laboratory and digital infrastructure to prevent brain drain and nurture local talent.
Mr Ankomah’s intervention comes at a time when Ghana seeks to reduce its “triple dependency” on external actors for security, social systems, and raw material processing. He argued that patenting and commercializing university research could create a self-sustaining cycle of wealth creation and reduce reliance on imported technology.
“Governments must act as facilitators, creating incubators on every campus, linking students, industry, capital, and policy. Protect intellectual property, patent innovations, turn research into enterprise, and make science and engineering attractive, respected, and rewarded,” he concluded.
Participants at the African Prosperity Dialogues praised the call for reform, noting that Africa’s industrialization under the AfCFTA framework hinges on the continent’s ability to protect and commercialize its scientific advancements.
