Building the One Square Mile:  Phasing and Civil Works Execution Plan (3)

By Sammy CRABBE

Infrastructure alone does not make a city great. Roads, grids, and buildings create the skeleton, but it is innovation, creativity, and collaboration that breathe life into the body. As the One Square Mile establishes its physical backbone, the next phase will focus on cultivating its intellectual and entrepreneurial spirit.

Phase Three is about building the heart of the city: the first Innovation Hub. This hub will be the catalyst that draws in dreamers, builders, entrepreneurs, researchers, and investors a place where ideas turn into startups, prototypes evolve into products, and collaborations ignite into companies that change lives.

In this phase, the One Square Mile begins to assert not only its presence but its purpose: to be a launchpad for Ghana’s, and Africa’s, digital and technological transformation.

Designing the first innovation hub – A blueprint for excellence

The Innovation Hub will not be a mere office complex or tech park. It will be a living ecosystem, carefully designed to foster invention, entrepreneurship, and interdisciplinary collaboration.

At its core, the hub will feature state-of-the-art coworking spaces, accelerator programs, maker labs equipped with 3D printers and fabrication tools, and coding academies. It will offer flexible workspaces for startups, corporate innovation teams, NGOs, and researchers, promoting a culture where sectors cross-pollinate and new ideas are born at the intersection of industries.

High-speed fibre-optic connectivity, immersive collaboration technologies (such as augmented reality workstations and virtual conferencing pods), and blockchain-secured intellectual property registration services will be standard features.

Meeting rooms, event spaces, and an open-air innovation plaza will serve as physical and symbolic gathering points for the city’s growing community of thinkers and doers. This first Innovation Hub must not only meet the needs of the present. It must inspire the future.

Establishing the anchor institutions – Accelerators, labs, and research centres

The Innovation Hub will be anchored by institutions that drive meaningful innovation outcomes.

A flagship Startup Accelerator Program will be launched, offering seed funding, mentorship, and structured training for early-stage entrepreneurs in sectors such as fintech, agritech, healthtech, edtech, and green technologies.

This accelerator will be run in partnership with global venture capital firms, corporate innovation labs, and university entrepreneurship centres, ensuring that participants have access to both funding and markets.

Dedicated Research Centres will be developed in partnership with leading Ghanaian and international universities. These centres will focus on applied research in fields critical to Africa’s development: artificial intelligence, blockchain applications, renewable energy technologies, digital health solutions, and smart agriculture.

These institutions will create a virtuous cycle where students become innovators, innovators become entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs build enterprises that feed back into the ecosystem.

A smart hospital as a beacon of health innovation

In parallel with the Innovation Hub, the One Square Mile will establish its first Smart Hospital a facility that showcases how technology can revolutionize healthcare delivery. The Smart Hospital will integrate telemedicine services, AI-assisted diagnostics, blockchain-secured medical records, and remote surgery capabilities.

Residents will be able to consult doctors via mobile apps, access predictive health services through wearable devices, and experience a healthcare model that is accessible, data-driven, and patient-centered.

Beyond clinical care, the hospital will serve as a healthtech innovation centre, partnering with startups, universities, and biotech firms to pilot new treatments, digital health tools, and mobile medical technologies.

Clinical trials, digital therapeutics development, and medical device testing will become part of the innovation ecosystem. Health will not be treated as a peripheral service. It will be embedded in the DNA of the city’s innovation engine.

Launching the One Square Mile Welcome Centre

The completion of the Innovation Hub will also coincide with the opening of the One Square Mile Welcome Centre a permanent exhibition and experience centre showcasing the city’s vision, progress, and investment opportunities.

Visitors from local entrepreneurs to global investors will be able to explore interactive models of the city’s infrastructure, participate in AR and VR tours of planned districts, attend innovation showcases, and meet with project ambassadors who can guide them through investment, residency, and partnership processes.

The Welcome Centre will project confidence, momentum, and ambition signaling that the One Square Mile is not a dream under construction but a reality unfolding.

Early public events and global integration

To announce the Innovation Hub’s arrival, a series of early public events will be held: hackathons, startup demo days, investment summits, coding bootcamps, and digital arts festivals. These events will not only animate the city with energy but also position the One Square Mile as a node in the global innovation network.

Partnerships will be established with international innovation hubs from Silicon Valley and Singapore to Nairobi and Tel Aviv ensuring that the One Square Mile is not an isolated experiment but part of a larger global dialogue on how technology can drive inclusive development.

By creating these early global linkages, the city will attract investors, researchers, tech founders, and innovators from across the continent and beyond, seeding a truly cosmopolitan ecosystem.

Conclusion – Breathing life into the future

Phase Three of the One Square Mile project is where the city moves from steel and concrete to spirit and community. It is where infrastructure meets imagination, and where dreams begin to take tangible form.

The Innovation Hub, the Smart Hospital, and the Welcome Centre will collectively announce to the world that Ghana is not waiting for the future to happen it is building it, leading it, and shaping it.

In this phase, the One Square Mile will not just build infrastructure.
It will build culture.
It will build confidence.
It will build the beating heart of Africa’s digital future.

>>>the writer is a PhD researcher specializing in blockchains and decentralized finance at the University of Bradford. He holds an MBA in International Marketing and a post-graduate certificate is research from the International University of Monaco. Sammy was the first president of the Ghana Business Outsourcing Association and developed Africa’s first data entry operation and Ghana’s first medical transcription company. He can be reached via [email protected]

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