GitHub's Policy team partnered with UNDP to conduct an Open Source Programme Office Readiness Assessment (OSPORA) in Ghana, evaluating the country's institutional readiness for large-scale open source adoption. The week-long engagement involved interviews and workshops with government officials, IT department heads, and local tech communities. Findings revealed strong political commitment and growing developer talent, but also gaps including the absence of a centralized open source policy, coordination silos between agencies, and under-resourced IT teams. The assessment highlights how open source governance at the national level differs from technical adoption — the real barriers are institutional inertia and entrenched procurement patterns, not technical limitations. Ghana's story is framed as a model for how governments can build sustainable open source foundations to support digital sovereignty and public service delivery.
