- DBG Pushes Differentiated Funding Model as Ghana Seeks to Scale ICT Businesses
Development Bank Ghana is calling for a fundamental rethink of how the country finances technology and ICT businesses, arguing that simply making more money available will not be enough to unlock the sector’s full economic potential.
Speaking on the sidelines of DBG’s ICT Roundtable Discussion in Accra on September 10, 2026, Chief Executive Prof. Randolph Nsor-Ambala said Ghana needs financing and business-support solutions designed around the different characteristics of technology-driven enterprises.
“The essence is to bring providers of finance, and investors, engineers, innovators, ICT, business, etc., within the ICT space, for a common understanding of how to progress the sector,” he said.
The roundtable brought together financiers, investors, engineers, innovators, ICT businesses and policymakers to examine how Ghana can mobilise capital and other forms of support to help the sector scale.
DBG’s own framing of the event positioned financing as a necessary complement to gains already made in connectivity and digital adoption. The broader question, according to Prof. Nsor-Ambala, is how Ghana can translate a growing digital economy into firms capable of scaling, competing and generating sustained productivity gains.
“You would have realized from the presentation from our chief economist, the enormous potential, currently, and into the future of ICT to Ghana’s economic transformation agenda,” he said. “The contribution as it stands currently is massive, and there are areas that we obviously have comparative and competitive advantage.” He added that the more important challenge is how to “unleash that full potential” rather than simply celebrate the sector’s current contribution.
For DBG, that starts with recognising that technology finance cannot be treated as a standard banking product. Different businesses operate with different levels of maturity, asset structures, cash-flow profiles and growth trajectories, meaning conventional lending may be appropriate for some firms but poorly suited to others.
“When it comes to financing, it also has to do with the structure of the financing: what is the appropriate financing instrument they need?” Prof. Nsor-Ambala said.
That distinction is particularly important for firms whose most valuable assets are intangible. Software, intellectual property, data, human capital and scalable platforms can generate significant enterprise value without producing the land, buildings or machinery that traditional lenders commonly accept as collateral. A young technology business may therefore be commercially promising while remaining difficult to finance under conventional credit-risk models.
The financing needs of a startup building a software product are also fundamentally different from those of a more established ICT company expanding into regional markets. The former may require early-stage equity or patient capital, while the latter may need longer-tenor debt, export finance or growth funding.
DBG’s argument is that the design of the financial instrument must reflect the stage of the business rather than force every firm into the same lending template.
Prof. Nsor-Ambala also stressed that access to capital is only one side of the problem. “Most importantly, there are also conversations on the softer issues, i.e. business development, preparing businesses to become investor-ready to be able to receive the finance,” he said.
The point is significant because a business can need capital and still be unable to attract it if its governance, financial reporting, management systems or commercial strategy are too weak.
Investor readiness therefore becomes part of development finance rather than an issue to be left entirely to entrepreneurs. For technology companies, this can involve strengthening corporate governance, protecting intellectual property, validating markets, improving financial controls and producing credible growth projections. Without those foundations, additional credit or equity may simply increase financial risk rather than create sustainable expansion.
DBG’s nationwide feasibility study has identified three broad constraints across the ICT ecosystem: financing, policy alignment and investor readiness or business development. “The issues are many,” Prof. Nsor-Ambala said.
“There are issues around financing, there are issues around policy congruence, there are issues around investor readiness and business support or business development.”
That diagnosis shifts the conversation away from the simplistic idea that Ghana’s technology sector is being held back only by a shortage of loans. A financing programme can fail even when money is available if regulation is inconsistent, businesses are not investment-ready or the capital offered does not match the risk and maturity profile of the enterprise. The architecture around the money therefore becomes as important as the amount of money itself.
The stakes are increasingly high as global technology markets become more competitive. Access to appropriate capital can determine whether Ghanaian firms remain small domestic service providers or become regional technology businesses capable of earning foreign exchange, creating skilled employment and exporting digital services.
DBG’s intervention therefore links technology finance directly to the wider question of whether Ghana can create scalable domestic companies rather than merely consume imported digital platforms.
Prof. Nsor-Ambala nevertheless resisted pressure to announce specific beneficiaries or financing packages before the roundtable process had been completed. “That would be unfair to the conversation, wouldn’t it?
Because essentially, we can’t assume to know it all when we are actually here to listen,” he said. The bank’s immediate task, he indicated, is to understand the precise constraints businesses face before designing interventions.
That listening process is intended to produce a more granular segmentation of the ICT economy. “The ICT sector is not homogeneous. The value chain is complex, and the peculiarities associated with the various nodes of value chains require different actions,” Prof. Nsor-Ambala said.
He added that the first actionable step would be to break interventions down by the different strata of the sector so that financing and support can be targeted more precisely.
The approach could become an important test of DBG’s role as a development-finance institution. Development banking is most effective when public capital catalyses private investment, corrects genuine market failures and helps viable businesses become financeable without permanently displacing commercial lenders.
The challenge is to avoid two extremes: offering generic credit that does not solve the underlying problem, or designing support so narrowly that only a small group of favoured firms can benefit.
Prof. Nsor-Ambala also stressed that any intervention must be tied to measurable outcomes. “We need to agree with everybody in the room around what would success look like.
And then basically stick to that, and then have continual conversations at regular intervals to measure ourselves against the targets,” he said. He also called for the engagement mechanism to be institutionalised rather than treated as a one-off industry discussion.
That emphasis on measurement could prove critical. The success of an ICT financing programme should not be judged only by how much money DBG disburses, but by whether recipient firms grow revenues, create skilled jobs, export services, attract follow-on private capital, improve productivity and survive beyond the initial funding period.
In development finance, disbursement is an input; commercially sustainable scale is the outcome.
The debate over whether Ghana should concentrate resources on a handful of potential technology champions also surfaced during the interview. Prof. Nsor-Ambala pushed back against a strategy centred on creating opportunities for only a select group, saying DBG’s mandate is broader.
“Our mandate is to create a competitive private sector,” he said, adding that competitiveness “means that we do not believe in creating opportunities for just the few.”
That position introduces an important policy tension. Concentrating capital can help a few promising firms reach the scale required to compete internationally, but a development bank must also avoid distorting competition or appearing to select winners without transparent criteria.
A more durable approach may be to design financing structures that allow strong firms to emerge through competition while ensuring smaller companies can also access appropriate support when they meet clear commercial and governance standards.
The broader implication of DBG’s intervention is that Ghana’s ICT financing challenge is not simply a shortage of money. It is a matching problem between capital and businesses, a governance problem around investor readiness and a policy problem around whether regulation and public institutions provide sufficiently predictable conditions for investment. Solving only one of those constraints would leave the wider ecosystem incomplete.
If DBG can translate the roundtable into differentiated financial products, business-development support and measurable outcomes, the impact could extend well beyond the technology sector. ICT can provide infrastructure and productivity tools for finance, agriculture, logistics, manufacturing, education and public services, meaning successful technology firms can raise efficiency across the wider economy.
That is why the debate is ultimately about more than lending to startups: it is about whether Ghana can build the financial architecture required to create technology companies that can scale across Africa and compete globally.
