Publication Details
Title:
Operationalizing Pillar 6 of Ghana's National AI Strategy in Insurance A Trust-first Blueprint for Sector Adoption.
Details:
Abstract
Ghana's National Artificial Intelligence Strategy 2025-2035, released by the Ministry of Communication, Digital Technology and Innovations on 12 December 2025 and publicly launched in Accra on 24 April 2026, commits the country to building AI that understands local languages, reflects local culture and is trained on Ghanaian data (Government of Ghana, 2025). Pillar 6 of the Strategy targets sector adoption, identifying insurance among its priority domains. This paper translates that ambition into an operational blueprint for the insurance sector. The argument is empirical, regulatory, theoretical and practical. Empirically, doctoral research on digital insurance adoption in Ghana finds that, when tested simultaneously, consumer trust is a stronger predictor of adoption attitudes than perceived usefulness, that ease of use is non-significant, and that infrastructure exerts a direct effect on adoption independent of attitudes and intentions (Botchey, 2025a). Theoretically, the paper extends the vendor trust compensatory regime (Botchey, 2025b) to AI-mediated insurance interactions, drawing on the established literatures on institutional voids (Khanna & Palepu, 1997, 2010), trust-integrated technology acceptance (Gefen, Karahanna, & Straub, 2003; Pavlou, 2003) and the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (Venkatesh, Morris, Davis, & Davis, 2003), and reframes AI adoption in Ghanaian insurance as a trustengineering problem rather than a capabilities problem. Regulatorily, the existing supervisory framework under the Insurance Act, 2021 (Act 1061) and the National Insurance Commission is shown to be a sufficient platform for AI integration, provided that sector-specific guidance is issued in parallel with the forthcoming Emerging Technologies Bill and informed by international precedents including the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority's opinion on AI governance (EIOPA, 2025) and the Financial Stability Institute's comparative review of AI in finance (FSI, 2024). Practically, the paper proposes a five-layer blueprint covering language and data, products, governance, skills and measurement. It also identifies a structural gap between the Strategy's ambition and the demonstrated readiness of public-facing AI systems, drawing on the publicly discussed launch of the Aku assistant to argue that local private-sector actors have a comparative advantage in implementation. The contribution is a regulator-implementable roadmap that aligns the Strategy's national objectives with the operational realities of an industry whose gross-premium penetration was 1.0 per cent of GDP in 2024 and 0.63 per cent on an IFRS 17 Insurance Service Revenue basis, highlighting that AI-enabled distribution must address structural under-penetration rather than only efficiency at current scale. Although the empirical setting is Ghana, the blueprint and the underlying regime classification are intended to be portable: the analytical pattern of Regime B and Regime C is encountered in many emerging-market insurance jurisdictions, and the paper aims to offer a transferable template for regulators in comparable institutional settings. The paper concludes with policy recommendations addressed to the National Insurance Commission, the Responsible AI Authority, insurers and brokers, and the Actuarial Society of Ghana.