Greater Accra held 491,817 people at the 1960 census and 5,455,692 at the 2021 one. That is 11.1 times more people in 61 years — about 81,375 more residents every year, for six decades, without a pause.
Almost everything people complain about in Accra is downstream of that one number.
The six counts, and why there are only six
Ghana has run a census roughly once a decade, and those counts are the entire record for Accra specifically:
| Census | People in Greater Accra | Per km² | Share of Ghana |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1960 | 491,817 | 152 | 7.1% |
| 1970 | 903,447 | 278 | 10.1% |
| 1984 | 1,431,099 | 441 | 10.7% |
| 2000 | 2,905,726 | 895 | 14.8% |
| 2010 | 4,010,054 | 1,236 | 15.7% |
| 2021 | 5,455,692 | 1,681 | 16.8% |
6 observations across 61 years, and nothing in between. The gap between the 1984 and 2000 censuses is sixteen years, which is longer than some Accra neighbourhoods have existed.
These are counts, not estimates
A census is people knocking on doors. Everything else on this site’s data page — Ghana’s population between censuses, its GDP, its inflation — is an estimate or a model. The Accra figures are the ones that were actually counted, and there are hardly any of them.
Faster than the country
Ghana as a whole grew 5 times over roughly the same period, from 6,961,215 in 1960 to 35.1 million in 2025.
So Accra grew about 2.2 times faster than Ghana did. It did not just get bigger along with the country; it took a steadily larger share of it:
- 7.1% of Ghanaians lived in Greater Accra in 1960
- 16.8% did in 2021
Roughly one Ghanaian in six now lives in the region, which is the smallest in the country by land area.
What that does to the ground
Greater Accra covers 3,245 square kilometres, so the density column above is just the counts divided by that: from 151.6 people per square kilometre to 1,681.
That average hides enormous variation — Ablekuma and Ashaiman are nothing like Shai Osudoku — which is what the map is for. The district map shades all 29 assemblies by the real census counts, so you can see where the people actually are rather than trusting a regional average.
The practical consequences run through most of this site:
- Housing. Demand has outrun supply for sixty years, which is the background to the rent advance everybody pays and nobody can afford.
- Water. Piped supply did not grow elevenfold, which is why the polytank on the roof is standard equipment.
- Waste. Bola collection is a private, paid, patchy service rather than a municipal given.
- Traffic. The road network grew, but not by a factor of eleven.
- Land. Where a city expands quickly onto unregistered land, you get land guards and double sales.
— How to find a place in Accra — Water in Accra — Waste collection — Buying land in Ghana
Three things the arithmetic cannot tell you
The boundaries moved. Greater Accra only became a region in its own right in 1982, and its districts were reorganised into the present 29 assemblies in 2018. The 1960 count and the 2021 count are not measurements of exactly the same piece of ground, and no honest multiple can correct for that.
Growth is not only births. A good share of it is people arriving from elsewhere in Ghana and from the sub-region. The census counts residents, not where they came from.
A regional total says nothing about a neighbourhood. Some districts have been losing people to their own suburbs while the region grew.
Where this is going
Ghana’s population growth rate has been falling for decades — it peaked at 3.05% a year in 1979 and was 1.83% in 2025 — and urban growth has slowed with it. Accra is still growing, but the era of adding a tenth of itself every few years is over.
The next census will be the seventh data point. Until then, anyone quoting a current population for Accra is extrapolating, and should say so.
— Ghana’s population in numbers — Accra’s economy in numbers — How to read Ghanaian statistics
Census figures from the GSS, national figures from the World Bank, both fetched 2026-09-10.