Africa Space Expo Highlights Progress and Gaps in Local Space Technology

The Africa Space Expo has concluded in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, after bringing together African start-ups, researchers, project laboratories and investors working on practical uses of space technology.

The expo focused on applications including food security, climate resilience, territorial monitoring, connectivity and maritime security. It also featured new international commitments, including the Ivory Coast’s signing of the Artemis Accords as the 75th signatory and Angola’s letter of intent on space cooperation with the United Arab Emirates.

Ghana’s space programme develops

Ghana’s progress was among the examples presented at the expo, although participants also pointed to constraints affecting the country’s ability to develop space technology domestically.

Ghana’s National Space Policy was approved by the cabinet in 2022 and launched in 2024. The government approved the establishment of a Ghana Space Agency in 2025, beginning the process of creating a dedicated national institution.

Joseph Tandoh of the Ghana Space Science and Technology Institute said the institute’s conversion into an agency should help Ghana move beyond using imported technologies. “We always say that Ghana Space Science and Technology Institute becoming an agency is to position Ghana in a way that we will not only be users of the technology but we will also contribute to designing, developing and building our own tools,” he said.

Ghana also became the first of South Africa’s eight African Square Kilometre Array partner countries to convert a redundant antenna into a functioning radio telescope. The 32-metre antenna at Kuntunse was transformed through cooperation with South Africa, and the telescope was launched in August 2017.

The Ghana Space Science and Technology Institute remains part of the Ghana Atomic Energy Commission. Ghana’s earlier nuclear-science ambitions date back to the country’s first years of independence, when a reactor project was initiated in Accra in 1961. The commission was established by an act of Parliament in 1963, while the reactor project was shelved in 1966 after Kwame Nkrumah was overthrown.

Satellite data for agriculture and environmental monitoring

The expo highlighted efforts to apply satellite data to challenges on the ground. The GEOMAIZE partnership between the Ghana Space Science and Technology Institute and VITO, the Flemish Institute for Technological Research, demonstrated how satellite information could be used in agriculture.

Tandoh said the project monitored crop health and developed algorithms to classify crops. Ghana is also expanding its use of Earth observation data and artificial intelligence for crop monitoring and yield prediction.

However, he said the yield-prediction model did not reach the expected level of accuracy. Smallholder farms often use mixed cropping, while available satellite soil-moisture data were too coarse to capture differences between small farms. A follow-up project supported by the French embassy and international research partners is working to improve agricultural yield estimates.

The institute has also used satellite data to track forest loss linked to mining. In cooperation with partners in Nigeria, it is developing a digital twin to simulate coastal erosion at Keta and Agavedzi.

Funding remains a major obstacle

Ghanaian experts said stronger public and private investment would be needed to build local capacity. Bright Atsu Sogbey called for state-backed laboratories and manufacturing hubs that could allow more space components to be produced locally instead of imported.

“Borrowed technology cannot be sustainable,” Sogbey said. He added that the state should work with private companies and use available resources to support laboratories and manufacturing hubs for the space industry.

Daniel Aboagye also called for space science to be introduced into education systems. “We cannot continue to be consumers of technology we do not understand,” he said.

For Ghana, Tandoh identified a satellite-data processing hub serving government ministries as an immediate priority. “Space cuts across all the ministries,” he said, adding that the country should first be able to build and validate its own tools before moving further into designing and launching satellites.

Private companies face similar financial pressures. Galaxy Aerospace Ghana launched a high-altitude balloon into near space in 2022 and captured images of Ghana’s geography. The company has designed mini-rockets for the Ghana Space Science and Technology Institute and trained young people in space robotics and artificial intelligence.

Victor Tagborloh, who founded Galaxy Aerospace in 2020, said the company had yet to secure an investor six years after its founding. It is seeking investment for a ground station and a geospatial-intelligence platform. The company also says it has secured 33,000 hectares at Apam in Ghana’s Central Region for a planned space university.

“We have the team, the knowledge, the research and the technical know-how,” Tagborloh said. “We just need funds.”

The wider African space sector faces a similar gap between ambitious plans and available infrastructure, investment and manufacturing capacity. The African Space Agency, headquartered in Egypt, is intended to provide a continental framework for cooperation. Galaxy Aerospace was unable to participate in the expo and said it hopes to attend the next edition.