Telecommunications is, by global habit, an industry that men run.
Spectrum auctions, tower deals and fibre contracts have historically been negotiated by men in grey suits, and the executive suites of most operators reflect that.
Ghana is a partial exception, and an instructive one.If you’ve made a phone call, sent mobile money, or registered for a Ghana Card in the last few years, odds are a woman had a hand in making that possible.
Ghana’s telecommunications sector, an industry that’s historically been run by men almost everywhere else in the world, looks different here.
Here are 13 of the women behind that difference
Sylvia Owusu-Ankomah
She runs the Ghana Chamber of Telecommunications, which is basically the industry’s collective voice, the group that represents phone and internet companies when they’re negotiating with government over rules that affect your monthly data bill.
Patricia Obo-Nai
An engineer by training, she spent more than 20 years at Vodafone Ghana before becoming its first Ghanaian CEO. When the company rebranded as Telecel Ghana, she was the one who led it through that change, and she’s still running it today.
Adwoa Afriyie Wiafe
She’s a lawyer who studied at Oxford, and at MTN Ghana, she’s the person handling the company’s relationship with regulators and its sustainability commitments, the work that decides how a company like MTN shows up as a corporate citizen, not just a phone provider.
Angela Mensah-Poku
Also at MTN, she runs the side of the business that sells connectivity and cloud services to other companies. If you’ve ever wondered how a bank or a hospital gets its internet and data systems set up, this is the kind of work she oversees.
READ MORE: The women who took the controls: Melody Millicent Danquah and Ayele Kome Ghana’s first female pilots
Lucy Quist
She made history as the first Ghanaian woman to run a multinational telecom operator in the country. Years later, she’s still one of the people other tech and business leaders point to when they talk about who shaped the industry.
Ursula Owusu-Ekuful
As Ghana’s Minister for Communications and Digitalisation from 2017 to 2025, she was behind some of the biggest, and most debated, digital projects in the country’s recent history: the Ghana Card rollout, SIM re-registration, and new cybersecurity rules. People argued about how well those programs were carried out. Almost nobody argues that they didn’t change the country.
Estelle Akofio-Sowah
Her career is basically a timeline of how the internet arrived in Ghana: she started at BusyInternet, one of the country’s early internet service providers, moved to Google, and now works on digital infrastructure across the whole continent.
Ethel Cofie
She founded Women in Tech Africa, an organization built around a simple problem: not enough women were getting into tech careers. She’s spent years working to change that math.
Angela Kyerematen-Jimoh
The founder and CEO of BrainWave AfricaTech previously ran IBM’s operations across North, East and West Africa and led Microsoft’s digital transformation work for the continent, the kind of résumé that means she’s helped decide how two of the world’s biggest tech companies actually operate in Africa.
Yvette Adounvo Atekpe
She’s spent her career helping businesses get connected, literally, pushing companies across the region to adopt the cloud and internet infrastructure they need to compete in a digital economy.
Clara B. Arthur
As CEO of GhIPSS, she oversees the system that lets your mobile money and bank transfers actually work across different providers. It’s not a household name, but it’s the reason your MTN Mobile Money can talk to someone else’s bank account.
Regina Honu
Through Soronko Solutions, she’s spent over a decade teaching young Ghanaians to code. If Ghana’s tech industry has a next generation, a good number of them likely learned their first lines of code from a program she built.
Mrs. Etta Mosore
Mrs. Mosore brings more than a decade of experience across the public and private sectors, with expertise in telecommunications law, cybersecurity, corporate governance, arbitration, and commercial litigation. As Deputy Director General for Managerial Operations, she works with the Director General and the NCA Board to strengthen regulatory oversight, improve service delivery, and support innovation in Ghana’s communications sector.
