New Delhi: India’s external affairs minister, S Jaishankar, held wide-ranging talks with Ghana’s foreign minister, Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, at Accra, with both sides agreeing to widen their partnership across trade, defence and technology. The meeting opened the Ghana leg of a five-day Africa tour that will also take Jaishankar to Cote d’Ivoire and Ethiopia.
Jaishankar arrived in the Ghanaian capital on Tuesday and was received by Ablakwa. He later wrote on X that India and Ghana, as global south partners, share development aspirations and a history of solidarity.
The agenda, he said, covered trade, investment, development cooperation, pharmaceuticals, capacity building, defence, technology and people-to-people ties under the two countries’ comprehensive partnership. Neither side has so far disclosed what the defence and technology discussions involved, and no agreements have been reported.
The ministers also reviewed multilateral cooperation, including ways for New Delhi to deepen its engagement with the African Union and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). Accra’s interest in the regional dimension is plain, since India has been seeking a firmer institutional footing across the continent.
Ghana’s foreign ministry had said a day earlier that the official visit, running from October 6 to 7 at Ablakwa’s invitation, would let both countries renew their bonds of solidarity and shared values. It described the trip as historic.
The ministry listed four areas for discussion. These were pharmaceutical development within the framework of President John Dramani Mahama’s “Accra Reset” philosophy, and agricultural cooperation in mechanization and value addition.
The other two were support for Mahama’s industrialization and job-creation agenda, and an expansion of scholarships and information technology partnerships. Pharmaceuticals and industrialization are areas where Indian manufacturers and training institutions have the most to offer, though that is an assessment rather than anything either government has stated.
India opened a representative office at Accra in 1953, before Ghana became independent, and established full diplomatic relations in 1957, immediately after independence. Health cooperation has been a visible strand more recently. Ghana received 600,000 Covishield doses through the Covax facility on February 24, 2021, followed by 50,000 doses as an Indian gift and a further one million doses in May 2022.
High-level contact has picked up in the past two years. Ablakwa visited India on March 17 and 18, 2025, for the Raisina Dialogue, where he met Jaishankar on the margins. In July 2025, the prime minister, Narendra Modi, travelled to Accra and was conferred upon the Officer of the Order of the Star of Ghana, the country’s national award, by Mahama. It was the first visit by an Indian prime minister since Narasimha Rao’s trip in November 1995. Jaishankar’s tour now moves to Cote d’Ivoire and Ethiopia.