IIPGH, ACity, and CSA take a joint White Paper on digital trust to Ghana’s political and military leadership.
By R. Kafui Amanfu
On 9 September 2025, Academic City University (ACity), the Institute of ICT Professionals Ghana (IIPGH),and the Cyber Security Authority (CSA) began a series of high-level engagements on Ghana’s digital trust agenda with the presentation of their joint White Paper, “Securing Trust in Ghana’s Digital Future: Accountability, Awareness, and Action,” to the Minister for Communication, Digital Technology and Innovation. The delegation subsequently engaged the Office of the Chief of Defence Staff of the Ghana Armed Forces on 10 September, and the Office of H.E. Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, Former Vice President of the Republic, on 16 September, in recognition of his long-standing advocacy for Ghana’s digitalization drive.
These presentations mark the start of a broader, national stakeholder outreach. In the coming weeks, the delegation is scheduled to engage the Parliamentary Select Committee on Communications, the Cybercrime Unit of the Ghana Police Service, telecommunications operators, the Office of the Vice President, and the Office of the President. The central message remains clear: cybersecurity in Ghana now sits at the intersection of national development policy and national security planning, requiring aligned action from all key institutions.
A Coalition Built for a Reason
For IIPGH, this partnership is a demonstration of what a professional body in this sector should be doing. The roundtable was not convened to produce a report that sits unread on a shelf. It was convened to force three different worlds; academic research, government regulation, and industry practice, into a single conversation, and to hold all three accountable for translating that conversation into recommendations with clear owners and deadlines.
Academic City provided the research grounding and the link to the next generation of Ghanaian technologists—the very people who will build and defend these systems. The Cyber Security Authority brought regulatory weight and the statutory mandate to act on what the roundtable uncovered. The Institute of ICT Professionals Ghana brought the connective tissue: industry practice, deep relationships with practitioners across telecoms, banking, government and the private sector, and the institutional neutrality to convene them all without being seen as representing any single interest in the room.
Together, they produced a document that institutions with real power to act are willing to receive, and to be held accountable to.
What the Numbers Show
The findings behind the White Paper explain the urgency. Between January and September 2025, Ghana recorded 14,425 cybersecurity-related contacts and 3,286 confirmed incidents, with losses estimated above GHS 19 million. Online fraud remains the most reported crime, followed by cyberbullying, online blackmail, unauthorized access, and information disclosure. These figures are not abstractions. They represent people who lost savings to a fraudulent transfer, businesses that lost customer confidence after a breach, and institutions that spent money and time cleaning up incidents that basic controls could have prevented.
The roundtable also identified problems that a single incident count cannot capture. Public awareness of cybersecurity risk is uneven, weakest in rural communities and among small and medium enterprises that often lack a dedicated security function. Many organizations still treat cybersecurity as a subset of general information technology work rather than its own discipline, which blurs accountability when something goes wrong. Ghana already has strong policies and legal frameworks in place; the persistent gap is in enforcement and follow-through. The country’s cybersecurity workforce also remains too small and too fragmented to match the scale of the threat it is meant to counter, and coordination among the agencies responsible for different pieces of the problem is still inconsistent.
Why this had to be a Coalition
Each finding points to a different actor, which is exactly why this document had to come from three institutions instead of one. A regulator cannot close an awareness gap in a rural district by issuing a directive. A university cannot enforce accountability inside a bank’s internal operations. A professional association cannot investigate a cybercrime. But together, these three institutions can identify where each gap sits, assign the right actor to close it, and follow up on whether it happened. That is the practical value of the White Paper: a shared diagnosis converted into a document with names attached to next steps, rather than a general call for more awareness that nobody in particular owns.
For the Institute, walking this document into the Minister’s office and into a military command’s briefing materials is a statement about the role a professional body can play in Ghana’s ICT sector. That role should not stop at training programs, certifications, and annual conferences, though those remain part of the work. It should extend to producing independent analysis that government can draw on when writing policy, and to mobilizing private sector and academic expertise faster than any single government agency working alone. This roundtable and White Paper are one demonstration of that role, carried out in practice rather than described in a mission statement. It is also a signal to the Institute’s own membership: professional credibility in this field is built by producing work that government, security institutions, and other stakeholders choose to act on.
Digital Trust as Infrastructure
This work sits inside a larger picture. Ghana’s digital transformation agenda, spanning mobile money interoperability, the national identification system, digital government services, and a more cashless and connected economy, depends on one condition that is simple to state and difficult to build: people have to trust the systems they are asked to use. A citizen will not adopt a digital government service if they fear their data will leak. A small business will not move its transactions online if it assumes fraud is common and unpunished. A bank cannot expand digital lending if it cannot verify who it is lending to. Every layer of Ghana’s digital economy strategy assumes a baseline of security and trust, and that baseline must be built deliberately. It does not appear on its own because the technology exists.
This is why a White Paper on digital trust, produced jointly by a professional body, a university, and the national cybersecurity regulator, is not a side project running alongside the digital transformation agenda. It is one of the agenda’s load-bearing components. Every digitization initiative the government pursues, from tax collection to health records to identity verification, becomes a larger target as it scales. Each one needs the workforce, the standards, and the accountability structures this coalition is working to put in place. A digital economy that grows faster than its trust infrastructure does not stay a growth story for long; it becomes a story about the incident that undermined public confidence and slowed adoption for years afterward. Ghana has the chance to build the trust layer alongside the growth, rather than after a crisis forces the issue.
From Presentation to Practice
The presentations to the Minister, the Chief of Defence Staff, and other stakeholders are not the end of this process; they are the beginning of its real test. A White Paper does not secure a digital ecosystem, but implementation does. Its value will be determined not by how well it was received in those rooms, but by what regulators, financial institutions, universities, and businesses do with its recommendations.
For the Institute of ICT Professionals, Ghana, the role now shifts from convener to catalyst and monitor. The critical questions are no longer about what needs to be done, but about execution: Will the accountability structures the roundtable called for actually be built, with clear lines separating IT operations from cybersecurity oversight? Will ownership of each recommendation be claimed and resourced, rather than vaguely assumed? And crucially, will the next set of national incident statistics, beyond the 3,286 cases and GHS 19 million in losses recorded between January and September 2025, look different because of it?
What Ghana has never lacked is policy. Strong frameworks exist. What has been missing is the connective tissue—the difficult, unglamorous work of turning policy into shared practice across institutions that rarely sit at the same table. Bridging that gap between regulators who set the rules, security agencies who see the threats, academia that builds the talent, and industry that carries the risk is precisely what this unusual collaboration between IIPGH, ACity, and the CSA was built to do.
The White Paper https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ouhx6iQ0yyeHG4p0Z0DdX3DBcX-nWKt-/view
R. Kafui Amanfu
Executive Director, Institute of ICT Professionals Ghana (IIPGH)
www.iipgh.org | linkedin.com/in/richard-kafui-amanfu
