Ghana’s One Million Coders Program should be judged by the quality of skills it produces, not the number of course completions, technology expert Desmond Israel has warned.
His comments follow the government’s announcement that more than 12,000 learners, 12,623 in total, have completed courses under the programme, a key plank of President Mahama’s digital agenda. Israel, founder of Information Security Architects Ltd, called the figure encouraging but said “course completion is not the same as competence.”
He argued that completion numbers alone do not show whether participants can find jobs, build products or launch businesses. The real question, he said, was what learners had become capable of doing, warning that the country risked strong statistics but weak real-world capability.
Israel called for the programme to publish deeper metrics, including assessment results, job placement rates, project outputs, regional participation, and gender and disability inclusion, rather than enrolment figures alone.
He also flagged a tension between expanding digital skills and proposals that could tighten regulation of technology professionals, cautioning against training young people to code while regulating them out of the market. Oversight, he said, should target high-risk areas such as critical infrastructure and cybersecurity services, not the entire sector, since a student developer and a critical infrastructure operator do not pose the same risk.
The One Million Coders Program, launched in 2025 under President Mahama’s reset agenda, trains young Ghanaians in software development, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and digital entrepreneurship, and aims to reach one million people over four years. Phase Two began on 11 May.
