Italy Came to Addis Ababa With a Plan — and Ghana Should Be Paying Attention

On February 13, 2026, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni addressed the second Italy-Africa Summit in Addis Ababa — the first time the biennial summit has been held on African soil. The venue was deliberate. The timing, on the eve of the African Union Assembly of Heads of State, was deliberate. And the message Meloni carried was equally precise: two years after launching the Piano Mattei, Italy was not there to make new announcements. It was there to account for what had already been built — and to signal what comes next.

"This is not an Italian plan for Africa," Meloni said from the podium. "It is Italy's contribution to Africa's agenda." The distinction matters more than it might seem. For decades, European engagement with Africa has operated through a paternalistic register — aid conditioned on compliance, investment structured to benefit the donor. The Piano Mattei is a deliberate attempt to rewrite that grammar. Whether it fully succeeds is a question that will be answered in implementation, not rhetoric. But the architecture being built is real, and the sums of money now moving through it are substantial.

Launched at the first Italy-Africa Summit in Rome in January 2024, the Piano Mattei for Africa is Italy's most ambitious continental engagement strategy in the post-war era. Named after Enrico Mattei — the Italian industrialist who built ENI on the principle of equitable energy partnerships with African nations in the 1950s — the plan frames cooperation not as charity but as mutual investment.

The financing architecture is multi-layered. At its centre sits the Rome Process/Mattei Plan Financing Facility — a multi-donor special fund administered by the African Development Bank, approved in February 2025. Italy anchored it with €100 million. The UAE added $25 million. Denmark joined in December 2025. The AfDB itself has committed €366 million to the associated African Development Fund replenishment, with cumulative Italian contributions to that fund now exceeding €3.1 billion. SACE, SIMEST, Cassa Depositi e Prestiti, ENI, Enel, Leonardo, and Confindustria were all present in Addis Ababa — the Italian corporate system arriving as a delegation, not merely a delegation of diplomats.

"Each project is permeated by the common thread of education and training. The goal is not to create new dependencies but to support the leadership of African peoples." — Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Addis Ababa, February 13, 2026

The Piano Mattei's infrastructure pillar is where the plan's potential converges most directly with Africa's most urgent structural need. Across sub-Saharan Africa, housing deficits are not gaps — they are chasms. Tanzania alone faces a shortfall of over three million housing units, growing by 200,000 each year. Ghana's urban housing deficit is estimated at nearly two million units, concentrated in Accra and the secondary cities absorbing rural-urban migration. Nigeria's deficit exceeds 28 million. These are not statistics about comfort. They are the physical expression of economies that cannot produce shelter fast enough for their own people.

Conventional construction — concrete block, timber framing, on-site masonry — cannot close these gaps at the required speed or cost. The labour intensity is too high, the material costs too variable, and the technical skills too unevenly distributed. What Africa's housing emergency requires is a structural system that is fast to assemble, light enough to be transported and erected without heavy machinery, strong enough to withstand seismic stress in vulnerable zones, and manufacturable at volume — whether in a factory or in the field.

Vincenzo Gentile, P.Eng., principal of Gentile Engineering in Toronto, has been developing and testing light-gauge open-web steel joist systems since 1986, when a prototype testing programme at a Magna International subsidiary in Toronto first validated his structural design. That validation was followed by engagement with CANAM in Montreal in 1987, testing with Dofasco (now ArcelorMittal) in Hamilton in 2002, and four decades of iterative refinement.

The result — the GENTRUSS system — is a patentable light-gauge open-web steel joist that outperforms conventional C-section framing on every meaningful metric: structural efficiency, allowable span, weight-to-strength ratio, and fabrication cost. A 14-inch GENTRUSS at 2.30 lb/ft achieves spans of 24 to 27 feet and accommodates mechanical services through 8-inch web openings — solving the sub-trades cost penalty that has historically made light gauge steel uncompetitive against wood framing. The system is manufacturable by automation or by field assembly, making it adaptable to both factory production and on-site construction in labour markets where skilled workers are scarce.

Critically, the GENTRUSS system has already been evaluated in an African context. Gentile Engineering was engaged by the Tanzania Peoples Defence Forces from 2011 onwards following a request for structural design guidance after a deadly armory explosion in Dar es Salaam. A full Value Engineering Analysis comparing available building systems confirmed light-gauge steel as the most cost-effective and technically appropriate solution for Tanzania's national housing programme. ArcelorMittal confirmed material supply. The Chief of Defence Forces approved a sustainability plan that would train military recruits in metal fabrication and construction — giving them civilian skills on exit from service, and simultaneously building the skilled workforce the housing programme needed.

That model — structured skills transfer embedded within a large-scale housing programme, with technology validated by an independent academic partner — is precisely the kind of intervention the Piano Mattei's education and infrastructure pillars were designed to enable and fund.

Ghana is not currently among the Piano Mattei's 14 focus countries. But the plan is explicitly designed to expand, and the criteria for engagement are capability, partnership, and readiness — not geography alone. More importantly, the financing instruments now operational through the AfDB — the Rome Process Facility, the Growth and Resilience Platform, the Italian Climate Fund — are accessible to eligible projects across the continent, not merely to countries formally listed as focal points.

In collaboration with Gentile Engineering, we are pursuing exactly this opening. The proposition is straightforward: deploy the GENTRUSS system and its associated light-gauge steel framing technology in Ghana's housing sector, anchored by the academic validation programme already agreed in principle with the University of Naples Federico II, structured to attract Piano Mattei infrastructure and education funding, and designed from the outset to build domestic fabrication capacity rather than import finished components.

Ghana has the preconditions for this to work. ArcelorMittal is an established regional steel supplier. Ghana's building code and regulatory environment, while in need of updating for this technology class, is more developed than most West African peers. The housing deficit is acute and politically salient. And the skills-transfer model that Gentile piloted with Tanzania's Defence Forces — training construction workers through structured programmes tied to large housing delivery contracts — is directly applicable to Ghana's vocational and technical education landscape.

Walter Kwami is pursuing a collaboration with Vincenzo Gentile, P.Eng. of Gentile Engineering (Toronto) to bring the GENTRUSS light-gauge steel system to Ghana's housing sector. The initiative is being structured to align with the Piano Mattei for Africa financing architecture and the academic validation programme proposed with Professor Mario D'Aniello, University of Naples "Federico II." Enquiries welcome.