GitHub and UNDP Partner to Advance Ghana's Development Priorities Through Open Source

The Ghanaian government is pursuing a large-scale Digital Reset, including cybersecurity and data protection, with the goal of creating jobs and growing businesses. In this process, adopting Open Source has emerged as a key task for building a sustainable ICT framework that is not locked into any specific vendor.

However, government-level adoption of open source comes with complex governance issues, including license compliance, internal maintenance capacity, and inter-ministerial cooperation. To address this, the OSPO (Open Source Programme Office) model, which is used in the private sector, is drawing attention.

With support from the French government, UNDP operates a diagnostic tool called OSPORA (Open Source Programme Office Readiness Assessment). This assesses institutional readiness for open source adoption by examining government policy, technical capacity, and procurement processes.

Recently, the GitHub policy team partnered with UNDP to conduct on-site workshops with major Ghanaian government agencies, IT department heads, and the local developer community. This collaboration is expected to help Ghana build transparent, scalable digital infrastructure based on open source.