Ghana’s population went from 6,961,215 in 1960 to 35.1 million in 2025 — 5 times as many people.
But the size is the least interesting part. Three other things changed at the same time, and together they explain most of what modern Ghana looks like.
This page is about Ghana, not Accra
Everything here is national. Ghana does not publish these series by region, so none of it should be read as an Accra figure — Accra is younger, denser and more urban than the national average, and the only Accra-specific record is the census. How Accra grew is the Accra version of this page.
Ghana stopped being a rural country
This is the big one:
| 1960 | 2025 | |
|---|---|---|
| Living in towns and cities | 23.29% | 58.92% |
| Urban population | 1,621,013 | 20.7 million |
The urban population grew 12.8 times while the country as a whole grew 5 times. Somewhere in the last fifteen years the share passed half, and Ghana became a country where most people live in a town — a transition that took Europe a century.
Urban growth is slowing, though. It ran at 5.66% a year in 1961 and 2.79% in 2025. The cities are still filling up, but not at the rate that built Accra’s outer districts.
— See the urban series on a chart
Ghanaians have far fewer children
Births per woman peaked at 7 in 1969 and stood at 3.3 in 2024. That is roughly half, in one lifetime.
The knock-on effect shows up in the age structure. Under-fifteens were 48.44% of the population at their peak in 1972 and are 35.43% now. Ghana is still a young country — a third of it is children — but it is ageing, and the classic consequence is a working-age bulge: for a few decades there are proportionally more adults and fewer dependents than at any point before or after.
That is either a dividend or a problem depending entirely on whether there are jobs, which is the argument behind most Ghanaian economic policy.
— Finding a job in Accra — Starting a business in Accra
People live much longer
Life expectancy at birth went from 46.9 years in 1960 to 65.7 in 2024 — nearly two extra decades.
Most of that gain is not adults living to greater ages. It is children not dying, which is what the malaria, vaccination, water and sanitation numbers are really measuring.
— Malaria and health — Electricity, water and the internet in numbers
The growth rate has been falling for forty years
Population growth peaked at 3.05% a year in 1979 and was 1.83% in 2025.
A falling rate on a much larger base still adds a great many people, which is the thing people get wrong about it. Ghana adds more people per year now, at 1.83%, than it did at 3.05% in the 1970s, because the base the percentage applies to has grown several times over since. A slowing growth rate is not a shrinking city.
What these numbers are, and are not
Between censuses these are estimates. Ghana counts people roughly once a decade; the World Bank series fills the years in between by modelling births, deaths and migration onto the last count. The 1960 and 2021 figures are anchored to a census. 1993 is not.
Life expectancy is not a prediction about you. It is a summary of current death rates across all ages, which is a different thing from how long a baby born today will actually live.
None of it is regional. Repeated because it is the single most common misreading: a national figure is not an Accra figure.
— How Accra grew — How to read Ghanaian statistics — Every series, charted
World Bank Open Data, fetched 2026-09-10.