Ghana’s Ministry of Communication, Digital Technology and Innovations kicked off a five-day Training of Trainers programme on August 31, 2026, aimed at building a corps of certified ICT instructors for the country’s One Million Coders Programme. The training is running at the Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT (GI-KACE) through September 4, with certified technical experts from Huawei Technologies delivering the curriculum on Datacom and Access Network Technologies.
Why a Trainer Pipeline Matters Now
The One Million Coders Programme, or OMCP, has struggled with a basic bottleneck since its April 2025 launch: too many applicants, not enough people to teach them. Ghana received roughly 94,000 applications within 48 hours of the pilot opening, forcing the government to expand its initial cohort of 500 to nearly a thousand almost overnight. Scaling a national coding programme to a million people cannot run on a handful of centres in Accra and Kumasi. It needs trainers who can carry the curriculum into every constituency.
That is the logic behind this week’s ToT cohort. Participants who complete the five-day programme are expected to become certified OMCP trainers, each required to train at least 20 members of the public afterward. The model resembles a multiplier chain — Huawei trains the trainers, and the trainers fan out across the country. If it works as designed, a single week of instruction in Accra could eventually touch thousands of citizens without the ministry having to fly in international experts every time.
The MTN, Huawei and Big Tech Playbook
The programme has leaned heavily on private technology partners since its inception. MTN, Google, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and now Huawei have all been folded into the delivery model, with big tech firms handling certification because, as Communications Minister Sam George has argued, many international employers do not recognise standalone local ICT certificates. TechMoonshot previously reported on the Ministry’s landmark MoU with MTN Ghana at MWC 2025, which laid the groundwork for exactly this kind of vendor-delivered training.
The current ToT batch narrows in on Datacom and Access Network Technologies, a more technical, infrastructure-facing skill set than the coding and AI modules that dominated earlier phases. That shift suggests the ministry is trying to widen OMCP beyond software development into the networking and telecoms competencies Ghana’s growing data centre and connectivity sector will need.
Ambition Meets Execution Risk
The trainer-of-trainers model is efficient on paper, but it inherits every weakness of the programme it serves. Independent reporting has already flagged serious execution gaps: an assessment found OMCP’s registration platform sitting effectively offline by November 2025, lacking a valid SSL certificate months after launch, with registrants describing promised classes that never materialised. A trainer network built on top of a shaky digital backbone risks certifying instructors who have nowhere functional to route their 20 mandated trainees.
There is also a labour-market question critics keep raising. Ghana’s youth unemployment sits at roughly 21.7 percent, and the government has repeatedly cited the UAE’s One Million Arab Coders programme as inspiration — an initiative that trained over a million people but ultimately flooded local job markets with junior-level coders competing for the same scarce roles. Training capacity is not the same as job placement capacity, and Ghana has not yet detailed how it will absorb a million newly certified graduates into an economy that currently offers structured digital training to only about seven percent of its youth.
What to Watch Next
The immediate marker is whether this week’s Huawei-led cohort actually produces working trainers who reach their 20-person quota, rather than certificates that sit unused. Beyond that, the ministry’s stated target of training 400,000 people in 2026 across 100 constituencies and at least four public universities will be the real test of whether the trainer pipeline scales as intended, or simply adds another layer of bureaucracy to a programme still finding its footing.
