All About Accra is a free, independent guide to living in Accra. It explains the things that are obvious to everyone who already knows them and impossible to find out if you do not: how the rent advance works, what SSNIT takes off your payslip, which queue at the NIA is the right queue, and why nobody uses street names.

It is modelled on All About Berlin, which has spent years proving that a city deserves one honest, well-maintained manual rather than a hundred blog posts written once and abandoned.

Who this is for

  • People moving to Accra from anywhere, including Ghanaians returning after years away, who find that half of what they remember has changed and the other half now needs a Ghana Card.
  • People who already live here and have hit a specific wall: a landlord demanding two years up front, a payslip that does not add up, a work permit renewal nobody can explain.
  • People helping someone else move here, who need to be able to send a link instead of writing the same message again.

It is not a tourism site, and it is not a relocation agency. Nothing here is sponsored.

How this site stays accurate

The hard part of a site like this is not writing it. It is stopping it from rotting.

Ghanaian figures move constantly. The National Tripartite Committee revises the minimum wage most years. PAYE bands change with the budget. The PURC adjusts electricity tariffs quarterly. A guide written in good faith in March can be confidently wrong by August, and a reader has no way to tell.

So no number is ever typed into a guide. Every figure on this site lives in a single file, content/constants.yaml, and each one carries three things:

  • where it came from — usually the Act, the regulation or the agency that publishes it
  • when a human last checked it against that source
  • the date it expires

When a constant passes its expiry date, the build fails. Not a warning in a log nobody reads — the site refuses to publish until someone opens the source and either confirms the number or changes it. A missing figure is obvious. A stale one is not, and that is exactly what makes it dangerous.

The guides then pull those values in. The minimum wage appears in four different guides and a calculator; all five read the same variable. They cannot disagree with each other, because there is only one of it.

The calculators work the same way. The salary calculator does not have its own copy of the PAYE bands — it reads the ones the taxes guide prints in its table. If the table is right, the calculator is right.

What this site cannot do for you

Be honest with yourself about the limits:

  • Fees at the counter are the real fees. Published schedules and what you are actually asked to pay are not always the same number. Confirm before you hand anything over.
  • This is not legal advice. The Rent Act, the Labour Act and the Immigration Act are quoted here because knowing what they say is useful leverage. Knowing what they say is not the same as having a lawyer.
  • Offices change their minds. Requirements, opening hours and which documents count as proof of address vary between branches, and sometimes between officers. Bring more paperwork than you think you need.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, out of date, or missing the one detail that would have saved you a wasted trip, say so. Corrections from people who just went through the process are the most valuable thing this site receives.