Ghana Bets on a 24-Hour Economy to Cement Its Recovery
As Ghana savours an economic rebound that has pushed its output past $100 billion, the government is pinning its hopes for durable growth on an ambitious idea: running the economy around the clock.
The '24-Hour Economy and Accelerated Export Development Programme', launched by President John Mahama, is built around the notion that Ghana's factories, farms, warehouses and service providers should operate in three shifts, day and night. Structured across eight thematic strands, it aims to lift manufacturing, agribusiness, logistics and services — and, crucially, to create jobs for a young workforce.
The logic is straightforward. Idle capacity is wasted capacity; machines and facilities that run only part of the day produce less and employ fewer people than they could. By incentivising continuous operations, the programme seeks to squeeze more output and more employment from the same industrial base, while boosting the exports that earn foreign currency.
The initiative arrives at a pivotal moment. Ghana's cedi has staged a dramatic recovery and growth has returned to around 6 percent, but the gains remain fragile, threatened by legacy debt in the energy sector, constrained public investment and exposure to global commodity and geopolitical shocks. A structural push to raise productivity is meant to make the recovery stick.
Success is far from guaranteed — round-the-clock operations demand reliable power, financing and infrastructure that are not always a given. But as a statement of ambition, the 24-Hour Economy captures a country determined not to slip back into the cycle of boom and bust that has dogged it before.
