The writer
Ghana receives nearly $4.6 billion a year in remittances from its diaspora. It receives this money from people working double shifts in care homes, stacking shelves through the night, driving strangers across cities in the small hours, and cleaning office blocks before the rest of the city wakes.
It is the product not of abundance, opportunity, or a functioning global meritocracy, but of fear and of institutional absence. And until Ghana builds the domestic systems that would make returning home a rational economic decision, that money will keep coming, and those people will keep suffering to send it.
This is not an article about migration. It is an article about governance. Specifically, it is about the institutional gap between what Ghana asks of its citizens abroad and what it offers them in return, both in the countries where they work and in the country they are building towards returning to.
That gap is not accidental. It is the product of decades of political choices, bureaucratic inertia, and a cultural economy of informal transactionalism that has made formal systems expensive to use, unreliable in their outcomes, and structurally hostile to the very middle-class aspiration they are supposed to serve.
Why do the Ghanaian abroad work longer hours than anyone else?
There is a persistent and flattering misreading of the Ghanaian work ethic in the West. It attributes the extraordinary hours that Ghanaians put into low-wage employment to cultural discipline, supervisory pressure, or a desire to integrate. None of these explanations is accurate. The Ghanaian in a warehouse in Wolverhampton, working 60 hours a week, is not responding to managerial oversight.
Their Western-born colleagues, earning the same wage and subject to the same supervisors, work 40 hours and go home. The Ghanaian stays not because the system demands it, but because the alternative to staying in a country with no family compound to return to is a financial crisis with no cushion beneath it.
In Ghana, a worker who loses their income can return to a family home, eat from a communal pot, and rebuild without the existential terror of homelessness. In Leeds, Amsterdam or Toronto, that same person faces a rent payment on the first of the month that does not care about their circumstances.
There is no parents’ house to retreat to, no extended family absorbing the cost, and no community safety net of the kind that Ghana, for all its institutional failures, still provides through family structure. The result is a particular and documented form of financial anxiety that drives working hours far beyond what physical health can sustain. The hours are not a virtue.
They are a response to structural vulnerability, and they are taking a measurable toll.
The physical cost is not theoretical. Back injuries, shoulder and knee damage, wrist and finger problems from repetitive manual tasks, and the cumulative wear of night shifts and rotating patterns are documented throughout African immigrant worker communities across Europe and North America.
Most Ghanaian workers in care, logistics, and cleaning sectors have no workplace injury insurance beyond the statutory minimum, and those working through agencies frequently have fewer protections than direct employees.
In countries with free healthcare, appointment booking systems for non-emergency conditions involve waits of weeks or months, and surgical queues for conditions that compound gradually through physical labour can stretch to years. The body breaks down in conditions that the system is not, in practice, designed to repair quickly.
There is a second driver of the long hours that is rarely discussed honestly in public. A significant proportion of Ghanaians working in low-wage employment in the West are doing so not only to survive but to accumulate visible capital for return.
The house in Kumasi, the car purchased during a visit home, the school fees paid for siblings, and the restaurant bills picked up without consultation: these are the currency of social repositioning in a community where departure for the West is understood to confer a status that must be demonstrated materially.
The Ghanaian working 70 hours a week in a Sheffield warehouse and remitting half of what remains is, in part, managing the expectations of a social identity they acquired the moment they boarded the plane.
More hours of work, however, do not produce more financial freedom. In the United Kingdom, earnings beyond a threshold are taxed at 40 per cent. The person working 70 hours a week does not take home 75 per cent more than the person working 40. They take home considerably less per hour worked than they calculate, after income tax, national insurance, and the transport costs of maintaining multiple employment sites.
The financial model of working harder to accumulate faster is arithmetically weak at low wage levels, and the mental health cost of sustaining it is established: rates of anxiety, depression, and stress disorder among African migrant workers in precarious employment run as high as 75 per cent in some studied populations.
Why returning home is not a rational economic decision
The argument made in polite Ghanaian political discourse is that the diaspora simply needs to be encouraged, incentivised, or emotionally reconnected to the homeland. This diagnosis is comfortable for politicians and wrong in its analysis.
Ghanaians abroad have not forgotten Ghana. They think about it in every remittance they send, in every plot of land they attempt to purchase, and in every business they attempt to establish remotely. What they have correctly identified is that Ghana’s institutional architecture makes economic return punishing in ways that are not metaphorical but structural and financially precise.
Consider housing. Ghana’s mortgage market is among the most inaccessible on the continent. Average commercial lending rates reached 31.1 per cent in June 2024. Mortgage interest rates from mainstream Ghanaian banks range between 18 and 37 per cent, depending on whether the loan is cedi or dollar-denominated. Loan terms rarely exceed 15 to 20 years, against the 25 to 35-year terms that are standard in the United Kingdom. Only 7.5 per cent of Ghanaians borrowed from formal financial institutions in 2021.
More than 80 per cent of public sector workers earn less than the equivalent of $196 per month, a figure that makes even the cheapest formally priced housing financially inaccessible under current lending conditions. Approximately 90 per cent of all housing supply in Ghana is delivered through incremental self-building using personal savings, meaning that the aspiration of owning a decent home is almost entirely disconnected from any functioning credit system.
Land ownership compounds this. Land litigation accounts for 52 to 59 per cent of all court cases in Ghana, a proportion that has remained high across successive administrations. Cases average three to five years for standard disputes and can extend to 10 to 20 years for complex ones. A Supreme Court ruling documented a single 50-acre parcel with 13 different registered sellers between 1984 and 2014.
Violent disputes displaced over 50,000 people in 2025 alone. The practical consequence for a Ghanaian abroad attempting to invest remittances in land or property is a legal environment so uncertain, so expensive in professional fees, and so opaque in its overlapping customary and statutory frameworks that the rational response is either to use informal intermediaries whose reliability cannot be guaranteed, or to abandon the investment entirely.
The credit environment for small businesses is no less hostile. Only 9 per cent of banking loans were directed to small businesses in 2022. The Development Bank of Ghana targets raising this to 15 per cent but remains dependent on external development partner funding and political capital rather than a self-sustaining market mechanism. Microfinance institutions charge interest rates of between 25 and 35 per cent.
The informal savings cooperative, the susu, remains the most relied-upon financial instrument for the majority of Ghanaian entrepreneurs precisely because formal financial systems have not earned the trust or built the accessibility that would make them a credible alternative.
The Ghanaian professional who returns from years of NHS employment or European logistics work with a business plan and a modest amount of capital does not find an ecosystem ready to receive that investment. They find a lending market priced for failure.
By Dominic Senayah
