When reports emerged that the Government of Ghana had declined a foreign proposal involving access to sensitive national health data — a deal reportedly valued at more than $100 million — the public reaction was unusually revealing.
Many Ghanaians instinctively understood something that policymakers across the developing world are only beginning to grasp: in the twenty-first century, data is no longer a by-product of governance. It is an asset class. A strategic resource. Perhaps the most valuable one of all.
The comparison to gold is no longer rhetorical exaggeration. Gold must be mined, transported, refined, and eventually depleted. Data, by contrast, is renewable, cumulative, and exponentially more powerful when connected across systems.
A single health record means little. But millions of interconnected records — combining medical history, genetics, demographics, behavioural trends, geographic movement, and consumer activity — become the raw material powering artificial intelligence, pharmaceutical innovation, financial modelling, public-health forecasting, and national economic planning.
The countries that understand this earliest will shape the next global order.And this is where Ghana finds itself at a fascinating crossroads.
For generations, African economies exported raw resources while others captured the real value higher up the chain. Cocoa left as beans and returned as branded chocolate. Gold departed as ore and re-entered global markets as wealth managed elsewhere. Oil generated revenues but rarely technological independence. The continent supplied inputs while others controlled refinement, ownership, and intellectual capital.
There is now a danger of repeating that same pattern digitally.Only this time, the exported commodity is not beneath the soil. It is embedded within people themselves.
Every mobile payment, hospital visit, biometric registration, educational record, consumer transaction, and DNA sample contributes to an emerging data economy whose long-term value may dwarf traditional extractive industries altogether.
Artificial intelligence systems are only as powerful as the data used to train them. And one of the greatest untapped advantages countries like Ghana possess is precisely what wealthier nations increasingly struggle to obtain: young populations, rapidly digitising societies, and highly diverse real-world datasets.
This is not merely a technological observation. It is a geopolitical one.Much of today’s global AI infrastructure has been trained disproportionately on Western and Asian populations, meaning African data — especially African health and genetic data — carries exceptional scientific and commercial value. In fields ranging from drug discovery to disease prediction, African genomic diversity offers insights unavailable elsewhere. That reality helps explain why foreign interest in African data is intensifying so rapidly.
Seen in this context, Ghana’s caution regarding external access to national health data was not anti-investment or anti-innovation. It was strategically sensible.
But that is also why current domestic discussions around compulsory DNA paternity testing deserve a more careful and nuanced national conversation than they have so far received.
The issue is not DNA testing itself. In certain circumstances — criminal investigations, missing persons cases, disputed inheritance claims, or genuine questions of parentage — DNA evidence can serve legitimate and important legal purposes. Most societies already recognise this. Nor should concerns about misuse prevent law enforcement from using forensic technology responsibly within constitutional safeguards.
The real question is scale, purpose, and governance.
There is an important distinction between targeted use of DNA in specific legal contexts and the routine collection of genetic information at a population level. Once genetic data is systematically collected, stored, digitised, and linked across institutions, its value extends far beyond the original reason for collection.
That is where the conversation becomes much larger than paternity.
A national DNA infrastructure — even if initially created for family-law purposes — could eventually become attractive to insurers, pharmaceutical companies, technology firms, advertisers, security agencies, and foreign actors. Not necessarily because of malicious intent, but because genetic and biometric data are among the most commercially and strategically valuable categories of information in existence.And unlike ordinary personal data, DNA cannot truly be anonymised forever. It is permanent. Deeply identifiable. Intergenerational by nature.
This is where Ghana faces a subtle but profound irony. At the very moment the country appears increasingly aware that its citizens’ data holds enormous long-term value, public discourse still often treats data governance as primarily a legal or administrative issue rather than an economic strategy. We debate data mostly in terms of privacy breaches, surveillance fears, or political controversy — all important concerns — but rarely in terms of national wealth creation.
Yet the future global economy may depend precisely on who owns, governs, and extracts value from large-scale datasets.
The most powerful technology companies in the world did not become trillion-dollar entities primarily because they manufactured physical goods. They became powerful because they accumulated behavioural data, attention data, location data, health data, and consumer intelligence at extraordinary scale. Artificial intelligence has only accelerated this reality.
Ghana therefore risks undervaluing one of its most important emerging national assets.
The conversation should not simply be about whether data should be protected. Of course it should. The more important question is how Ghana can position itself to retain ownership, bargaining power, and long-term economic benefit from the data generated by its own population.That requires moving beyond reactive policymaking.
Instead of treating data collection as isolated sectoral exercises — one initiative in health, another in banking, another in identity systems, another in telecommunications — Ghana needs a coherent national data strategy comparable to how states historically approached oil, mining, or industrialisation.
Such a strategy would recognise three realities simultaneously.First, data must be protected because abuse carries enormous consequences for civil liberties, discrimination, and public trust.Second, data also carries immense developmental potential if ethically governed.Third, the greatest danger is not merely foreign access itself, but entering data relationships from a position of weakness, fragmentation, or short-term desperation.
Countries that benefit most from the data economy are not necessarily those with the largest populations. They are the ones that create trusted governance systems around data ownership, consent, infrastructure, and monetisation. This is where Ghana could genuinely distinguish itself on the continent.
Rather than becoming merely a supplier of raw datasets to foreign technology ecosystems, Ghana could position itself as a regional leader in ethical AI governance and sovereign digital infrastructure. It could build secure local data centres, strengthen independent oversight institutions, invest aggressively in AI research and cybersecurity talent, and create legal frameworks that ensure citizens share in the economic value derived from national datasets.
It could also negotiate from a position of collective leverage rather than isolated transactions. African states individually may struggle to compete with global technology giants. But coordinated standards around African data governance could fundamentally reshape bargaining power.
Most importantly, Ghana must avoid reproducing digitally the same extractive patterns that historically characterised natural resources.
The central lesson of the last century is not simply that resources matter. It is that ownership of processing, infrastructure, and intellectual value matters more.
Raw data alone is not wealth. The ability to govern it, refine it, analyse it, and build industries around it is where real power emerges.
This is why the national conversation around DNA, health records, digital identity systems, fintech, and artificial intelligence cannot remain fragmented. They are all connected to the same underlying question: what role will Ghana occupy in the future global digital economy?
Will it become a sovereign participant that builds wealth from its informational assets? Or merely a low-cost supplier of raw digital material for systems designed and monetised elsewhere?
The answer will not be determined by one bill or one rejected deal alone. It will depend on whether policymakers begin to see data not simply as a technological issue, but as a long-term economic and strategic foundation of national development.
Because in the decades ahead, nations may discover that the most valuable resource they possessed was never underground at all.
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