Ghana’s economy is growing again, but 56.4 percent of Ghanaians remain in poverty, exposing the gap between an improving national balance sheet and the lives of people expected to benefit from it.
Development Diaries reports that World Bank Division Director for Ghana, Liberia and Sierra Leone Robert Taliercio O’Brien made the observation at the launch of the tenth Ghana Economic Update, pointing to widening spatial disparities and growth led by sectors with limited capacity to absorb the country’s growing labour force.
The numbers behind the recovery are impressive, as Ghana’s economy grew by six percent in 2025 and accelerated to 6.4 percent in the first quarter of 2026, while inflation fell from 23.2 percent in February 2025 to 3.2 percent in March 2026.
Debt also fell from 70.3 percent of GDP to 49 percent in a year; reserves were rebuilt on the back of a trade surplus and record gold export receipts, and the country completed its IMF Extended Credit Facility programme.
The government also recorded a primary surplus of 2.5 percent of GDP in 2025, beating the IMF programme target of 1.5 percent.
There is a catch in that last achievement, and that is the fact that capital spending was 38 percent below budget after an audit led the government to deny some payment claims and project work slowed.
In other words, part of the money that helped produce the surplus was money that did not get spent on the projects that Parliament had approved.
Meanwhile, the government has not clearly shown how much of the 38 percent underspend came from rejected claims and what came from delayed or abandoned work.
Without that distinction, Ghanaians cannot tell how much of the surplus came from stronger financial controls and how much came from projects that simply did not happen.
The World Bank’s transport findings make the cost of that gap easier to see, with only 27 percent of Ghana’s 94,200-kilometre road network paved, leaving roughly 69,000 kilometres unpaved, while the country’s operational railway network fell from 947 kilometres in 1960 to 160 kilometres in 2020.
A road that exists on a budget document but remains unusable on the ground does little for the woman trying to reach a health facility during obstructed labour or the farmer trying to get produce to market before it spoils.
The transport figures therefore tell a story about health and household income as much as they tell one about roads.
The poorest communities are also more likely to live furthest from the benefits of economic recovery, as the World Bank’s finding that spatial disparities are widening is particularly important in Ghana’s northern regions, where poverty, weaker access to health services and lower school completion rates intersect with poor infrastructure.
For smallholder farmers, especially women in rural communities, poor roads can quietly become a permanent discount on what their produce earns at the farmgate. When transport costs rise, traders have room to pay less, while the farmer carries the loss from a road that may have been approved for construction but never completed.
If the sectors driving economic growth cannot absorb enough of the growing labour force, headline growth can coexist with unemployment, underemployment and the pressure to leave Ghana in search of work elsewhere.
The inflation figure also deserves some caution, as a fall in inflation means prices are rising more slowly. A household that struggled through years of rapid price increases does not suddenly recover its lost purchasing power when inflation falls to around four percent.
Ghana’s constitution already gives the state a standard against which this recovery can be judged. Article 36(1) directs the state to manage the national economy in a way that maximises the welfare of every person and provides adequate means of livelihood, while Article 36(2)(d) also requires balanced development of every region.
The World Bank’s finding of widening spatial disparities should therefore be read alongside those constitutional commitments.
Citizens can ask the Ministry of Finance for the 2025 capital execution figures broken down by sector and region, showing separately what was withheld following audit findings and what remained unspent because projects were delayed.
For civil society organisations, they can ask the Ghana Statistical Service for the poverty line behind the 56.4 percent figure, together with regional and sex-disaggregated data, while farmer organisations in northern Ghana can document differences in farmgate prices linked to road access and put that evidence before the Ministry of Roads and Highways.
As for the Parliament’s Finance Committee, it should require the Minister for Finance to present a detailed capital execution variance report with the 2027 budget, showing where approved spending was withheld, delayed or completed and what each decision meant for regional development.
The Ministry of Finance should also publish a rural road investment plan that prioritises districts using evidence such as maternal mortality, market access and poverty levels, while the Ghana Statistical Service should publish the full methodology behind the poverty estimate and its regional and sex-disaggregated breakdown.
Ghana’s recovery will mean much more to its people when the numbers in the economic update begin to show up in the roads they use, the prices farmers receive, the jobs young people find and the services available in the poorest regions.
