When the Department of Geomatic Engineering at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology marked its 50th anniversary on Friday, it brought together alumni, partners, and the next generation of engineers to reflect on a journey that began with two students and a mandate to map Ghana. The speaker it invited did not come to merely celebrate.
Prof. Samuel Andam-Akorful, Head of Department, had been clear in his opening remarks about where the department’s eyes were fixed. “We are preparing ourselves to be a very modern department that trains the best geospatial professionals you can find wherever you are,” he said.
“The next fifty years will be defined by what we build from here.” Mr. Henry Kwamena Baffoe, Managing Director and Co-Founder of BigData Ghana Limited, took the floor with a single argument. Ghana, he told the assembled engineers, academics, students, and executives, does not lack data. What it lacks is the will and the infrastructure to act on it.
“Africa does not only have a data problem,” he said. “Africa has a decision problem.”
His argument was straightforward. The continent has accumulated more data than at any previous point in its history. Satellite imagery. Climate records. Agricultural surveys. Census data. Mobile network information stretching back decades. None of it, he said, is in short supply. What is in short supply is the institutional will and the technical infrastructure to convert it into decisions that change outcomes.
The timing was pointed. In recent weeks, flooding has displaced families across Accra and shut down commercial activity in some of the city’s busiest areas. The spatial risk data for those corridors, Mr. Baffoe noted, has been available for years. What was missing was not the information. It was the system that should have acted on it.
Mr. Baffoe has spent eight years building that system. BigData Ghana is an AWS Certified Partner and was selected as the only Ghanaian Earth Observation company among ten African organisations chosen for the EU-AU Space Partnership Programme. Its work is live, not in development.
He described three deployments. The first is the Ghana Agricultural Information and Monitoring System, which uses satellite imagery and vegetation data to make farming activity visible to banks and investors who have historically declined to lend because they could not verify what was in the ground or where. In 2021, the work behind the system won BigData Ghana the Digital Earth Africa Innovation Challenge, making it the first Ghanaian company to take the continent-wide competition.
The second is the National Forest Monitoring System, which tracks changes across Ghana’s forest landscape in near real time. Alongside it runs ForestTrace AI, a deforestation tracking platform that draws on historical data, monitors present conditions, and predicts where deforestation is likely to occur next. Its scope extends beyond human settlement expansion to include bush fires, illegal mining, and every other driver of forest loss.
The system is now being developed toward EU Deforestation Regulation compliance, helping cocoa farmers and gold producers demonstrate that their supply chains are free of deforestation risk, a requirement that is reshaping how Ghanaian commodities access international markets.
ForestTrace AI was built during and won the Gen AI for Geospatial Challenge hosted by AWS, Women+ in Geospatial, 5G, and Lunate AI, with the result announced in January 2026. The two systems together allow institutions to intervene early rather than respond late, which is, Mr. Baffoe argued, the only intervention that works.
The third is a Flood Intelligence Agent in development that will allow government agencies, district assemblies, and emergency services to query spatial data and receive specific guidance rather than static maps. He offered an example of what that looks like in practice.
“Imagine a district assembly asking an AI agent: what are the flood implications of this proposed development, and receiving an evidence-based assessment in minutes,” he said. “Imagine emergency agencies identifying which communities need the earliest warnings before the rain arrives.”
The private sector, he said, is not exempt from the same failure. Banks pricing risk on property portfolios without spatial data are, in his words, pricing blind. Developers approving sites without flood exposure assessments are carrying liabilities their boards have not fully considered. The intelligence that would change those decisions, he said, already exists.
The lecture’s sharpest passage came when Mr. Baffoe turned from what has been built to what has not lasted. He told the room that Africa produces pilot projects with impressive regularity. Platforms are launched. Dashboards are demonstrated. Awards are collected. Then, in most cases, the funding ends and the systems are quietly set aside.
“How many of these systems become part of how institutions operate every day?” he asked. “How many survive after funding ends? How many produce measurable change?”
He called for a shift in how the profession defines success. Not the technical sophistication of what is built, but the evidence that something changed because it was built. A farmer who received financing. A forest that was protected. A community that received a warning in time.
To the students in the room he was direct. Learn to code, he said. Python, SQL, cloud computing, artificial intelligence. Not because every engineer must become a software developer, but because the scope of what you can influence is determined by what you can build. Then start with a different question.
“Do not begin with: what map can I create,” he said. “Begin with: what decision must improve.”
He ended by addressing the assumption, common among young professionals across the continent, that world-class technology cannot be built from within Africa.
“A team in Ghana can use African data, global cloud infrastructure, open-source tools and local knowledge to build solutions of international quality,” he said. “The opportunity is here. What we need is the courage to build.”
The Department of Geomatic Engineering at KNUST was founded in 1976. Friday’s lecture was the first in a series the department intends to hold annually. The second speaker at the event was Krijn Driessen, Project Manager of the WaterWorX Project at VEI Ghana.
About BigData Ghana Limited
Your most expensive decisions deserve better intelligence. BigData Ghana is a technology company that leverages geospatial intelligence to help organisations plan, develop, invest, and execute with confidence.
Headquartered in Accra, the company serves government institutions, banks, investors, private sector businesses, agricultural enterprises, logistics operators, and infrastructure developers across Ghana and the wider African continent.
An AWS Certified Partner, BigData Ghana was selected as the only Ghanaian Earth Observation company among ten African organisations for the EU-AU Space Partnership Programme.
In 2021, it became the first Ghanaian company to win the Digital Earth Africa Innovation Challenge. Its work spans geospatial intelligence, cloud computing, data analytics, and business intelligence.
