In Kumasi, seventy teenage girls are learning to code alongside their male peers, building driverless vehicles and programming smart toll gates in a twelve-week programme that's reshaping how young people in Ghana's Ashanti Region prepare for a digital future. Telecel Ghana's Ashanti Codes initiative launched this year with an ambitious goal: to train one thousand youth across Kumasi and Obuasi with the technical skills the modern economy demands, and crucially, to do it with a majority-female cohort in a field where women remain dramatically underrepresented globally.
The timing reflects a quiet urgency spreading across West Africa. As artificial intelligence reshapes workforces and digital literacy becomes as foundational as reading, young people in Ghana face a widening skills gap. This programme exists precisely to narrow it. The twelve-week curriculum isn't theoretical—students already have prototypes to show for their work. The launch event in Kumasi featured the fruits of their labour: autonomous vehicles, intelligent toll systems, and obstacle-navigating machines that hint at the calibre of thinking these young coders have developed in just weeks.
Komla Buami, External Affairs Director at Telecel Ghana, framed the initiative not as charity but as investment in continuity. "If we are able to equip our own young ones and grow with it and also have it as part of their skills, it will be a part of them," he said during the launch—a philosophy that recognizes digital literacy as a life-long asset, not a semester-long course. Beyond the Ashanti Codes cohort itself, the Telecel Foundation is training teachers to become digital skills trainers within their own schools, working alongside the Ghana Library Authority to scale impact. The foundation is also providing standard technology kits aligned with Ghana's official education curriculum, removing practical barriers that often prevent rural and under-resourced schools from teaching advanced subjects.
The scale speaks to ambition. One thousand beneficiaries across two cities in the Ashanti Region represents a substantial commitment, but it's also part of a larger regional strategy. Dr. Frank Amoakohene, Ashanti Regional Minister, noted that the government's own digital training programme for older youth is reaching approximately twenty-three hundred young people across the region's forty-seven constituencies this year. Telecel's contribution, he said, meaningfully supplements these public efforts. "For Telecel alone to take one thousand and making sure you add to the numbers is something commendable," he asserted, pledging full government support for further expansion.
Dr. Micheal Essuman, Board Chair of the Ghana Library Authority, was direct about what's at stake: the country's economic future hinges on digitization. He urged participants—especially the girls whose presence in the cohort breaks important ground—to embrace the programme as foundational. "Everything that's happening from now into the future is digitally aged," he said, "and so you should take it up seriously."
What makes Ashanti Codes stand out isn't just its reach or its pedagogy. It's the explicit commitment to gender balance at a moment when technology fields globally struggle with diversity. Seventy percent female participation in a coding initiative challenges assumptions about who belongs in these spaces. Combined with curriculum designed around real-world problems—driverless cars, smart infrastructure—the programme positions young Ghanaians not as consumers of technology but as creators and problem-solvers shaping what's possible.