I still remember the first time I stumbled upon the power of data. It was 2017, and I was building my first PHP project. It was an inventory system for a university department. I didn’t think much of it then, I wanted to impress my lecturer who gave me the project. I was just trying to solve a simple problem: track where every asset was and who was responsible for it. But when the system went live, something clicked. Suddenly, the department could see what it owned. Patterns emerged, missing items, unused equipment, overstocked labs.

That’s when I realized data wasn’t just a byproduct of technology. It was the product.

Since then, I’ve been fascinated not just by the act of building software or web platforms, but by what the system reveals. Every click, entry, or transaction tells a story. And if you listen closely, through collection, cleaning, and analysis, you begin to see the hidden structure of how things really work.

Today, everyone talks about Artificial Intelligence, as if it’s a crown jewel, the final product of human ingenuity. And in a sense, it is. But what we often forget is that AI is only as powerful as the data it’s trained on. Without data, AI is a blank slate; a brilliant mind with nothing to think about.

Data is the oil of the AI economy. Whoever controls it, refines it, and understands it holds the real power. It’s not the algorithm that changes the world; it’s the dataset that feeds it. The same AI model trained on two different datasets can produce two entirely different worldviews. That’s how powerful data is, it defines reality itself for machines.

Dominance.

The companies dominating the global AI race: Google, Meta, OpenAI aren’t just software companies. They are data empires. Their true advantage isn’t their engineers (though those are world-class), but the vast oceans of human behavior they’ve recorded, structured, and learned from.

In Ghana, and across Africa, this is where we’re losing the game, not because we lack talent, but because our data lives in silos. Hospitals keep medical data locked away. Universities have research trapped in PDFs and ugly blue booklets. Businesses track transactions in Excel sheets that never meet the light of day. Our systems don’t talk to each other, and as a result, we fail to see the big picture.

The tragedy isn’t that we don’t have data. It’s that we don’t have connected data.

Imagine if we could unify agricultural data across regions, or health data across hospitals. Imagine if we could use that to predict food shortages, track disease patterns, or measure real economic growth beyond what national statistics tell us. The potential is staggering; but first, we need to unlock the data that’s already here.

That’s why I believe Africa needs something new, a Data Science Research Lab. Not just another academic department, but a living project. A place where developers, researchers, and institutions collaborate to collect, clean, and analyze real data, Ghanaian data, African data.

A place that makes meaning out of what we already have, and uses it to build what we’ve never had.

Because while AI may be the crown jewel, data is the crown itself.

And until we start treating it that way, collecting it, protecting it, sharing it: we’ll always be spectators in a revolution built on our own information.

One of those things you think of on Friday. Don't mind me.