Ghana: Ghana should welcome the economy's strong growth performance, but it should not become complacent about what is driving that growth. An economy can expand rapidly while failing to create enough decent jobs, strengthen domestic productive capacity or reduce its dependence on imports.
According to Ghana Web, the danger lies in Ghana's increasingly unbalanced growth pattern, where sectors like Information and Communication Technology (ICT), along with transport and storage, are expanding more vigorously than traditional employment-intensive sectors such as manufacturing, agriculture, and hospitality, with fishing actually contracting. While rapid growth in ICT and transport is beneficial for a modern economy, the problem arises when these sectors disproportionately account for incremental economic activity, leaving behind sectors that can absorb a large workforce and produce goods for domestic and international markets.
Growth in ICT cannot substitute for growth in factories, farms, and fisheries. Although digital services can create highly productive and well-paid employment, they cannot alone absorb the millions of Ghanaians entering the labor market, especially workers more suited for productive activities outside the technology sector. Manufacturing, agriculture, and fishing are crucial as their expansion can create employment, deepen domestic value chains, reduce imports, and generate export earnings, leading to a more economically resilient Ghana.
The current growth composition should be seen as a policy warning. If Ghana continues to import large quantities of manufactured goods and food products while celebrating headline GDP growth, the country risks experiencing economic expansion without transforming its productive structure. This kind of growth can also perpetuate pressure on foreign exchange, especially when increased domestic incomes lead to higher demand for imported goods.
The solution is not to restrain ICT, transport, or storage, but rather for the government to create conditions that make manufacturing, agriculture, and fishing more profitable and investible. This involves ensuring reliable and reasonably priced electricity, efficient ports and roads, affordable long-term finance, predictable taxation, effective irrigation, modern extension services, fisheries management, industrial infrastructure, and policies encouraging local value addition.
Government incentives must be disciplined, with support linked to measurable improvements in productivity, domestic sourcing, employment, value addition, and export performance. However, the government cannot achieve this alone. The private sector must positively respond to the opportunities created by sound policy, with Ghanaian businesses investing in machinery, technology, skills, processing capacity, and larger-scale production rather than focusing on trading and short-term financial opportunities.
The objective should be clear: ICT and logistics should support Ghana's productive transformation, not replace it. A sustainable growth strategy is one where technology enhances farm productivity, logistics improve factory competitiveness, and finance enables enterprise scaling. Ghana needs strong growth that creates jobs, increases domestic production, and boosts exports, transforming the economy rather than merely enlarging it.