MTN Ghana has translated a corporate sustainability commitment into a tangible institutional act, donating computers, projectors and presentation screens to the Office of the Minister of State for Climate Change and Sustainability, and walking away with a formal invitation to help shape the country’s national climate policy.
The donation, presented at a ceremony this week, followed an earlier engagement between the telecommunications company and the newly established ministry during which officials outlined their immediate operational needs. Adwoa Wiafe, Chief Corporate Services and Sustainability Officer at MTN Ghana, described the company’s response as deliberate and prompt. “When the ministry was being set up, we engaged to understand its immediate needs. Today’s donation directly responds to those priorities and supports the vital national work underway,” she stated.
The gesture goes beyond goodwill. Minister of State for Climate Change and Sustainability Issifu Seidu used the occasion to formally invite MTN Ghana to nominate a representative to the ministry’s Technical Working Committee, a monthly convening of cross-ministerial representatives tasked with harmonising Ghana’s sectoral climate efforts into a unified national action platform. The invitation makes MTN Ghana one of the first private sector entities to be brought into the institutional architecture of the country’s newest ministry.
The ministry itself has been moving at pace since its establishment under President John Dramani Mahama’s administration in 2025, the first time Ghana has dedicated a minister of state exclusively to climate change and sustainability. Among the institutional reforms the minister outlined is the creation of Climate Change and Sustainability Units across all Municipal and District Assemblies to integrate climate adaptation into local governance, as well as a Climate and Sustainability Hub envisioned as a national centre of excellence for evidence-based planning, innovation, and climate investment matchmaking.
Ghana has also been selected as the incoming chair of the African Group of Negotiators on Climate Change (AGN) for 2026 to 2027, a development that adds weight to Minister Seidu’s argument that national climate architecture must keep pace with Ghana’s expanding international climate obligations.
The minister’s appeal for private sector involvement was unambiguous. “We cannot tackle climate change in isolation. It affects every sector of the economy. Collaboration with the private sector is crucial to ensuring policy coherence, monitoring and evaluation and building a strong national conversation around climate action,” he said, signalling that MTN’s participation is meant to signal a broader pattern rather than remain an isolated act of corporate generosity.
Wiafe, for her part, connected the donation to MTN Ghana’s own sustainability trajectory, citing the company’s rollout of electric vehicles and biodegradable subscriber identity module (SIM) cards within its operations as evidence that the company’s engagement with the ministry is rooted in shared institutional purpose rather than reputational interest alone.
Minister Seidu also announced plans for a National Climate Business Forum intended to draw the private sector more deeply into Ghana’s adaptation and sustainability agenda, signalling that the MTN engagement is likely to be the first of many such corporate partnerships the ministry will cultivate.
