A Sierra Leone delegation is spending five days at Ghana’s telecom regulator studying 5G licensing, number portability and consumer protection as both agencies mark milestone anniversaries.
The team from Sierra Leone’s National Communications Authority began the benchmarking visit to Ghana’s National Communications Authority on July 13, with sessions covering 5G licensing, mobile virtual network operators, mobile number portability and consumer protection. The trip lands as NatCA marks its 20th anniversary and works toward eSIM integration and a planned 5G trial, while Ghana’s NCA marks 30 years as the country’s communications regulator. “We are here to learn and take some valuable lessons away,” NatCA Director General Amara Brewah said, adding that the two countries face similar regulatory challenges and that Ghana’s longer track record offers useful lessons as Sierra Leone modernises its sector.
This is not NatCA’s first trip to Accra for this purpose. A similar benchmarking visit took place in April 2022, when Brewah, then Deputy Director General of the agency’s predecessor, the National Telecommunications Commission, led a four member delegation to the same NCA offices, and the commission had made a comparable visit to Nigeria’s telecoms regulator the year before. The current visit continues a working relationship between the two regulators that has spanned Sierra Leone’s own institutional transformation, from NATCOM into NatCA under the NatCA Act of 2022, a change that broadened the agency’s mandate from telecoms alone into wider ICT regulation.
Sierra Leone is not approaching 5G from a standing start. Africell switched on the country’s first 5G network in October 2023, and Orange followed within about three months, both rollouts developed under NatCA’s supervision. The benchmarking visit appears aimed less at introducing 5G to the market than at refining the licensing and consumer protection framework around services already live.
The visit also fits a broader pattern of West African regulatory cooperation. NatCA signed a free roaming agreement with Guinea in November 2025 during the African Council of Regulators summit held alongside the Transform Africa 2025 Summit, following Ghana, Togo, Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso and Liberia in striking similar deals as part of the Smart Africa Alliance’s push toward a single regional digital market. Welcoming the delegation on behalf of NCA Director General Edmund Fianko, Deputy Director General Etta Mosore said the exchange would extend to spectrum harmonisation, broadcasting regulation, and monitoring and enforcement, calling cooperation between the two regulators a way to strengthen institutional capacity across the region.
