Even though Ghana may not be blessed with all the sophisticated equipment you could think of and much wealth, it has unfailingly produced stalwarts in the fields of physics, maths, medicine, chemistry and space studies.
The research done by these people have really made significant impacts on others around the world. Scroll down to see some of the greatest achievements from these Ghanaians.
Francis Kofi Allotey
Francis Kofi Allotey, a respected mathematical physicist was the first to introduce computer education to Ghana.
He is known for the "Allotey Formalism" which arose from his work on soft X-rayspectroscopy. He subsequently received the Prince Philip Gold Medal Award in 1973 out of the "Allotey Formalism" principle.
In 1974, the founding fellow of the African Academy of Sciences became the first Ghanaian full professor of mathematics and head of the Department of Mathematics at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology.
Ebenezer Laing
He was a Ghanaian botanist and geneticist as well as a Professor Emeritus at the University of Ghana, Legon. Laing, together with his university classmate and faculty colleague, George C. Clerk, was one of the first Ghanaian academics to specialize in botany as a scientific discipline. This contributed significantly to the growth of the field in Ghana.
Laing’s research was in plant genetics.
Professor Felix Konotey-Ahulu
He is one of Ghana’s leading scientists and one of the world’s leading experts in sickle-cell anemia. He has lectured all around the world and is the author of a major 643-page text, The Sickle Cell Disease Patient (Macmillan, 1991, ISBN 0333-¬39239-6; Tetteh-A’Domeno Co., Watford, UK, ISBN 0-9515442-2-5, 1996).
Professor Konotey-Ahulu is the first person known to have traced hereditary disease in his forebears, generation by generation, with all names, right back to 1670 AD.
Now living in the UK, Professor Konotey-Ahulu has been widely recognized by medical practitioners and specialists around the world. This lead to his inclusion in a survey of “The 100 Greatest Africans of All Time”.
He was one of the recipients of the Dr Martin Luther King Jr. Foundation Award ‘for outstanding research in Sickle Cell Anaemia.
Herman Chinery-Hesse
Even though he was born in Ireland, studied in America and worked in Britain, when he made up his mind to build a software company, he wanted it to be in Africa. With only a computer, Chinery-Hesse moved to Ghana in 1990, and began writing programs and selling them with a friend.
Dubbed the "Bill Gates of Ghana", Chinery-Hesse basically brought e-commerce to the remote areas in Africa. The Ghanaian software entrepreneur and the founder of SOFTtribe has other innovations including Shop Africa 53, Keba-Ekong, Quickie, and Akatua.
Bright Simmons
Before setting up his own enterprise in Ghana, he realized that the greatest investment in technological infrastructure in Africa was coming from mobile telecom companies. He subsequently decided to tackle the problem of counterfeit medicine. His organisation, mPedigree, now works with 20 telecoms companies and is in discussions with others. Its system has appeared on 6.5m packs of medicine and been adopted as the national standard in three different countries.
Joseph Quansah, Benjamin Bonsu, Ernest Matey
The three graduates from the All Nations University in July 2017, put Ghana into the Global Space community.
Ghanasat1, the two-year project from the graduates was released from the International Space Station (ISS) into orbit via Japan/KIBO Deployment system onboard the ISS at 0850 hours on Friday, July 7, 2017.
It was monitored by a team of the University’s officials and led by Ghana’s Ambassador to Japan, Mr Sylvester Parker Allotey in the control room of Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) at its Tsukuba Space Centre in Japan.
Ghana subsequently became the first Sub-Saharan African country to send a satellite into orbit around the earth.