Solomon Asamoah on Building the Skills Ghana Needs to Deliver Its Own Infrastructure

By Ama Owusu

Ghana has never been short of infrastructure plans. The Ghana Infrastructure Plan prepared by the National Development Planning Commission sets out a programme running from 2018 to 2047, with an estimated requirement of about US$37.2 billion a year across power, transport, water, housing and digital networks. Plans of that scale tend to be judged by the money they attract. In practice they are decided just as often by something less visible: whether there are enough Ghanaian engineers, planners, surveyors, site supervisors and technicians to design the assets, manage their construction and keep them working for the decades that follow.

That question runs through the work of Solomon Asamoah, a development finance professional who has spent more than three decades on African infrastructure. The skills behind an asset are part of the asset. A road designed abroad, built largely by an imported workforce and maintained on call-out contracts may open on time, but the country that owns it learns little in the process and pays again each time something needs fixing.

The workforce behind the pipeline

Infrastructure delivery depends on a layered workforce. At the top are the professionals who define projects: transport planners, hydrologists, structural and geotechnical engineers, quantity surveyors, procurement specialists and project managers able to hold a contractor to a programme and a budget. In the middle sit the technologists and site supervisors who turn drawings into works. At the base, and most often overlooked, are the craftspeople and maintenance technicians. Electricians, welders, plant operators, pump mechanics and road maintenance crews decide through their daily work whether an asset lasts thirty years or ten.

Ghana’s regulatory framework already recognises these layers. Under the Engineering Council Act, 2011 (Act 819), the Engineering Council keeps registers not only of professional engineers but also of engineering technologists, technicians and craftsmen, with licensed bodies such as the Ghana Institution of Engineering handling certification. That structure matters because it treats the technician and the craftsman as members of the profession rather than as an afterthought. The policy task is to make each layer large enough, and well enough trained, for the scale of what the Ghana Infrastructure Plan envisages.

The institutions are now in place

Over the past decade Ghana has rebuilt much of its architecture for technical education. The Technical Universities Act, 2016 (Act 922) converted six polytechnics, in Accra, Ho, Koforidua, Kumasi, Sunyani and Takoradi, into technical universities. Cape Coast and Tamale followed in 2018, and Bolgatanga and Wa in 2020. The Pre-Tertiary Education Act, 2020 (Act 1049) then created the Ghana TVET Service, bringing technical and vocational institutions previously spread across several ministries under the Ministry of Education. Among the bodies realigned were the National Vocational Training Institute, GRATIS, the Technology Solution Centres and the Roads and Highways Training Centre. A separate regulator, the Commission for Technical and Vocational Education and Training, sets standards and accredits providers.

On paper, this resolves much of the fragmentation that long weakened Ghanaian TVET. Act 1049 gives the TVET Service explicit duties to implement curricula in collaboration with industry, to facilitate workplace experience and apprenticeships, and to maintain linkages with domestic and international industry. Those duties are exactly what an infrastructure skills strategy needs. The remaining challenge is to connect them to the real project pipeline, so that training follows the work Ghana is actually commissioning.

Development partners have backed the shift. The World Bank approved US$200 million for the Ghana Jobs and Skills Project in June 2020, including competency-based apprenticeship training for 25,000 people. The African Development Bank devoted its 2020 African Economic Outlook to developing Africa’s workforce for the future, calling for education and training that respond to what employers need and for stronger partnership between public and private providers of vocational training. What is needed now is a sharper link between those programmes and the assets on Ghana’s books.

Tie training to the projects themselves

The most practical lever is the project itself. Every major contract Ghana signs for a road, a substation, a water treatment plant or a rail line is also a training opportunity, if it is designed as one. Contract documents can require a defined share of supervisory and technical roles to be filled by Ghanaian staff, with structured on-the-job training, named counterparts and measurable progression. They can require contractors to take apprentices from accredited TVET institutions and to certify the competencies those apprentices gain. They can make the handover of operating manuals and diagnostic training a condition of completion rather than a courtesy.

The Ghana Infrastructure Plan already points in this direction in places. In the power sector it refers to a Local Content Policy for the electricity supply industry that aims for local participation of at least 60 per cent across the value chain, covering engineering, procurement and construction contracts, installation works, and operations and maintenance staff. For rail, it proposes a Railway Training School alongside a new regulator. These are the right instincts. Applying them consistently to roads, water, drainage and urban services would give TVET institutions and technical universities a predictable demand signal, so they would know which trades and how many trainees the pipeline is likely to need over the next five to ten years.

Maintenance is a skill set

Assets across the region are too often commissioned without the people needed to look after them. Pumps stand idle because no one nearby is trained to service them. Street lighting goes dark because replacement parts and qualified technicians sit on different contracts. Asamoah’s published writing has returned more than once to Ghana’s maintenance gap, and the skills side of that problem gets the least attention. Maintenance technicians need training on the specific equipment Ghana is installing, refreshed as the technology changes.

Technical universities and TVET institutes are well placed to build short, certified courses with manufacturers and operators, so that a technician in Tamale or Takoradi can be certified on a solar inverter, a water pump or a traffic signal system without travelling abroad. Metropolitan, municipal and district assemblies, which look after much of the local road and drainage network, also need engineers and works supervisors on their own staff rather than relying entirely on consultants brought in for each job.

Building the project management layer

Professional project management capacity matters just as much. Large projects tend to struggle at the interfaces: between design and construction, between ministries and agencies, and between a contractor’s claims and the client’s decisions. Ghana needs a deeper bench of public sector project managers and contract administrators who can read a programme, challenge a variation and resolve a dispute before it becomes a delay.

That capacity can be grown deliberately. Three measures would help:

1. Secondments that place promising public sector engineers on well-run projects, including those led by development partners, so they learn delivery from the inside.
2. Professional certification for project and contract managers, supported by the Engineering Council and its licensed bodies, so that competence is recognised and portable.
3. A public service career path that rewards people for staying in delivery roles, rather than losing them to the private sector or abroad after their first major project.

Data underpins all of this. There is no widely published picture of how many civil, electrical and water engineers, technologists and technicians Ghana will need to deliver its infrastructure plan, or how many its institutions produce each year. A joint skills forecast, prepared by the planning commission with the TVET Service, the technical universities and the main infrastructure agencies, would allow training places to be planned against real demand and updated as the pipeline changes. It is the kind of groundwork that Asamoah’s writing on project readiness has consistently emphasised.

A country that keeps its own assets

Ghana’s infrastructure ambitions are long term by design. The plan runs to 2047. The engineers who will manage its later phases are in school today, and the technicians who will maintain its first assets are being trained, or not, right now. Treating skills as part of the infrastructure pipeline, rather than as a separate education question, is how a plan on paper becomes a network that Ghanaians design, build and keep running themselves.

In a field where Solomon Asamoah has spent most of his working life, the measure of success is not only what gets built but who is able to look after it afterwards. A road or a power line that Ghanaian engineers can inspect, repair and improve is worth more over its life than one that depends on outside help each time something goes wrong. Building that capability is slower than signing a contract, but it is the part of the work that lasts.