IBM has announced the opening of a full subsidiary office in Accra, Ghana. The new office will enable IBM to deliver high-value solutions and services to meet the growing needs of clients in Ghana and West Africa.

“IBM has made substantial investments in Ghana over the past year in terms of skills development and we see opportunities for further development as business and government leaders capture the potential of information technology to transform their enterprises and work smarter,” said Joe Mensah, General Manager, IBM Ghana.

The Accra office is part of IBM’s West Africa operations and will complement IBM’s subsidiary office in Lagos, Nigeria which acts a hub for business in the region. IBM has supplied products and solutions to Ghana since the 1970s, and already works closely with a number of business partners in the country including CFAO, Infotech, IPMC, Micro Warehouse and Sunnet.

IBM has an active program of citizenship in Ghana and elsewhere in Africa. One of the programmes is IBM’s Corporate Service Corps (CSC) initiative – a corporate version of the Peace Corps, through which, over the past two years, IBM has deployed teams of IBM employees to Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania, and South Africa to work on projects key to increasing local and national competitiveness. The CSC teams are made up of IBM employees from around the world who are carefully selected to perform community-driven economic development, working at the intersection of business, technology and society.

Ghana became one of the first countries in the world to play host to IBM’s newly created Corporate Services Corps in July 2008. Since then, IBM has deployed four Corporate Service Corps teams in Ghana working in key areas such as Information and Communication Technology (ICT), Business Development, Tourism, Finance and Academia.

To deliver its Corporate Service Corps programme in Ghana, IBM partnered with Citizens Development Corps – a non-profit international economic development firm and is also partnering with a number of local organization including: Ghana Multimedia Incubator Center (GMIC), the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Aid to Artisans Ghana (ATAG), Association of Ghanaian Industries (AGI), National Business Small Scale Industries (NBSSI) and Suame Magazine Industrial Development Organization (SMIDO).