Search for IT companies in Ghana and you will get a list. Several lists, in fact, mostly ranked by who paid for the placement or who had the most complete directory profile. None of them tell you the thing you actually need to know, which is whether a given company can do your work, at your sites, to a standard you can evidence to your board.
This guide is the framework we would use if we were on your side of the table. It is written by an IT company in Ghana, so read it with that in mind. We have tried to make it useful rather than flattering, and several of the tests below are ones plenty of providers, including some larger than us, will fail.
First, decide which kind of company you are looking for
Most wasted procurement time comes from talking to the wrong category of supplier. There are broadly four in Ghana.
- Hardware suppliers and computer companies. They sell and repair equipment. Right for a purchase, wrong for an ongoing function.
- Software developers and web companies. They build things. Right for a product, wrong for keeping an estate running.
- IT services and support companies. They run the technical function: support, networks, installs, field work. Right when you need capability rather than a deliverable.
- Managed service providers. IT services companies that take ongoing responsibility under service levels for a fixed monthly fee. Right when you want IT to be an operating cost rather than a sequence of emergencies. See managed services company in Ghana.
A single company can occupy more than one of these categories, but very few are genuinely strong across all of them. Ask which one they consider their core business, and be suspicious of an answer that is simply "all of it".
The most useful question in the whole process is unglamorous: where do your engineers actually live?
The nine questions that separate providers
1. Where are your engineers physically based?
Not "which cities do you serve", which every provider answers with a long list. Ask which cities have permanently based, directly employed engineers. A two hour response target for Tema means nothing if the nearest engineer is dispatched from Accra during morning traffic, and even less if they are a contractor who may or may not be free.
2. Are your engineers employed or subcontracted per job?
Subcontracting is not automatically wrong, but it changes what certification and background checks mean. If the person who arrives at your server room was engaged that morning, the provider's ISO posture and training programme are not describing the person in your building.
3. What does your service level agreement say about severity?
A single response target for all tickets is a sign the agreement was written to be signed rather than to be used. A serious SLA distinguishes a site outage from a single user request, states when the clock starts, and says what happens when a target is missed.
4. Show me a real monthly report.
Redacted, from an existing client. Ticket counts alone are decoration. You want volumes by category, resolution times against target, repeat incidents by cause, and a statement of what is being done about the recurring ones. If no such report exists, the service is being run on memory.
5. Who maintains the asset register?
If updating it is a separate manual task rather than an output of the work, it will be wrong within a year, and you will be paying maintenance on equipment that no longer exists. Ask how a decommissioned device leaves the register, and who signs that off.
6. How do you handle data protection under Act 843?
Ghana's Data Protection Act 2012 (Act 843) applies to your supplier as it applies to you, and the EU GDPR may reach them through your clients. The answer you want is specific: what is documented, what is auditable, how personal data on retired equipment is destroyed and evidenced. Awareness of the Act is not compliance with it.
7. What happens at the end of the contract?
Ask, before signing, how documentation, credentials, configurations and the asset register are handed back, and in what timeframe. A provider confident in its service answers this plainly. A provider whose retention strategy is your dependency will not.
8. Can you support us in more than one country?
Many Ghanaian organisations grow into Nigeria, Togo or Benin, and discover that their provider cannot follow. If regional expansion is plausible within the contract term, ask now rather than running a second procurement later.
9. Who will actually own our account?
A named person, reachable, who attends the service review. Sales attention before signature and anonymity afterwards is the single most common complaint about IT suppliers in this market, and it is easy to test for by asking who you will be speaking to in month seven.
Signals worth weighting, and signals worth ignoring
Worth weighting: directly employed certified engineers in the cities you occupy; a real, redactable monthly report; references you can telephone, ideally in your own sector; documented data protection practice; a clear exit process; and evidence of work at your scale rather than your industry.
Worth ignoring: the length of the client logo wall, partner badges that only evidence a reseller relationship, office photographs, and any claim of nationwide coverage that dissolves when you ask which cities have based engineers. Awards and directory rankings are worth exactly as much as their selection criteria, which are usually published and usually thin.
How to run the selection itself
- Write down your sites, your users and your tolerance for downtime before you talk to anyone. Providers will otherwise scope the engagement for you, in their favour.
- Shortlist three, not eight. Beyond three, comparison quality falls faster than choice improves.
- Ask all three the nine questions above in writing. Written answers are comparable and, later, contractual.
- Telephone two references each, and ask specifically about the worst incident they have had, and how it was handled.
- Start with a defined pilot where you can: one site, or one service line, for ninety days, with the reporting you would want at full scale.
Where Hankaka fits
In the interest of being straightforward: Hankaka Technologies is an IT services and managed services company based in Accra, with directly employed certified engineers in Accra and Tema, and in Lagos, Port Harcourt and Abuja in Nigeria, plus Lome and Cotonou. We publish our addresses and our response model, we work under Act 843, the EU GDPR and Nigeria's NDPA 2023, and we hand back documentation on request.
We are a poor fit if you want a hardware supplier, a software development house, or the cheapest quote in the room. We are a good fit if your problem is that things break in more than one city and nobody currently owns the outcome. You can see the full picture on our IT company in Ghana page, or compare service lines on our services overview.
Whichever way your selection goes, run the nine questions. A supplier that answers all nine well is a supplier worth having, whether or not it is us.