MTN Group and Ghana have inked a major deal to work together on the government’s flagship ‘One Million Coders Program’, which aims to train young Ghanaians with artificial intelligence, coding, and digital skills to drive the country’s digital transformation.
On the sidelines of the Mobile World Congress 2025 in Barcelona, Ghana’s minister of communication, digital technology, and innovation, Samuel Nartey George, and MTN group president and CEO Ralph Mupita signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to explore areas for collaboration on what the minister described as President John Mahama’s new administration’s flagship initiative.
The MoU follows the introduction in 2023 of the MTN Skills Academy in multiple MTN operating countries, including Ghana.
The MTN Skills Academy aims to provide access to digital and financial skills training across the continent.
The Academy provides a range of courses, including coding, web development, digital marketing and data analytics, to ensure that 60% of youth and adults have at least basic proficiency in sustainable digital skills by the end of 2025.
“We engaged with the MTN Group and expressed our desire for a partnership that will fuel the capacity of young Ghanaians in artificial intelligence, digital technology, data governance, and cybersecurity,” Minister George said.
“We recognise that, as part of its 25th anniversary, MTN (Ghana) is making significant investments in Ghana. The MTN building, donated to the government of Ghana, will become one of our centres for excellence for artificial intelligence and software development. We are committed to backing MTN in this endeavour.”
Mupita thanked the minister and his delegation for two days of constructive engagements and for choosing MTN as a trusted partner.
“We are very focused on understanding Ghana’s strategy and how we, as MTN Group and MTN Ghana, can support it,” he said.
“We thank you for your commitment in terms of creating an enabling environment for us to carry on the work we are doing, very humbly though, to support the building out of the digital ecosystem that will be a catalyst for growth and expansion and meet the socioeconomic objectives of the Ghanaian government,” Mupita added.
MTN pointed out that given that around 3000 languages are spoken across Africa, it was incumbent on Africans to guarantee that they worked on their large language models to build the solutions made feasible by generative AI
“We must develop our talent on the African continent; we must develop our software engineers, and we must be doing more around coding to enable us all to be future fit,” Mupita said.
MTN Group’s senior vice president for markets, Ebenezer Asante, said: “Between MTN and Ghana, we will partner using common projects to advance the cause of African development.”
