Ghana’s infrastructure record over thirty years is one of the better ones in Africa on three counts and one of the worse ones on a fourth. The fourth is the one nobody puts on a poster.
The record
| Earliest | Latest | |
|---|---|---|
| Access to electricity | 30.6% in 1993 | 91.9% in 2024 |
| Basic drinking water | 65.52% in 2000 | 89.92% in 2024 |
| Using the internet | 0% in 1990 | 72.18% in 2024 |
| Basic sanitation | 5.72% in 2000 | 31.58% in 2024 |
Electricity access tripled in about thirty years, which is a genuinely first-rank achievement and one of the highest access rates in West Africa.
Sanitation is the number that matters
Basic sanitation went from 5.72% to 31.58% — 5.5 times better, and still under a third of the country.
It is the worst figure on the whole dashboard, and it is the one with the most direct effect on whether children live. Diarrhoeal disease, cholera and much of what shortens life in dense settlements come through the gap between that number and the electricity number.
The distance between 89.92% with drinking water and 31.58% with sanitation is the story: it is far easier, cheaper and more politically rewarding to deliver water to a house than to deal with what leaves it.
— Waste collection in Accra — Water in Accra
Access is not reliability
This is the most important thing to understand about the electricity figure, and the World Bank series cannot show it.
91.9% have a connection. That is not the same as having power. Dumsor is the Ghanaian word for exactly this gap — the connection exists, the electricity does not arrive. A household counted in that 91.9% may still be on a load-shedding rota, or on a prepaid meter that ran out at 2am.
The same applies to water. Being counted as having a basic drinking water source is compatible with the taps running twice a week, which is why the polytank on the roof and the pure water sachet are standard equipment in a country with 89.92% access.
What these series measure
“Access” and “basic” are technical definitions about the type of infrastructure within reach, not about whether the service works. They are the right measure for tracking a country’s build-out over thirty years and the wrong one for deciding whether you need an inverter. You do.
— Electricity and dumsor — The map’s district layers
Phones: more subscriptions than people
Mobile subscriptions per 100 people:
| Per 100 people | Year | |
|---|---|---|
| Peak | 133.6 | 2018 |
| Latest | 113.6 | 2024 |
Over 100 per 100 people does not mean everyone has a phone. It means more active SIMs than humans, because carrying two or three is normal in Ghana: one network has coverage where another does not, and call rates differ within a network. The figure says nothing about how many people have no phone at all.
The fall from 133.6 in 2018 is also not people giving up phones. Ghana ran a SIM re-registration exercise tying every SIM to a Ghana Card, and millions of unregistered SIMs were deactivated. A statistical cull, not a behavioural change — and a good example of a real drop in a series that means the opposite of what it looks like.
— Internet and SIM cards — Mobile money
Health spending
| Share of GDP | Year | |
|---|---|---|
| Earliest | 1.66% | 2000 |
| Peak | 4.59% | 2013 |
| Latest | 2.95% | 2023 |
Total health spending — public and private together — peaked at 4.59% of GDP in 2013 and is 2.95% now. As with education, a falling share of a growing economy is not necessarily falling spending, and the series cannot settle that on its own.
What it does explain is why NHIS covers what it covers and why so much care is paid for out of pocket.
— NHIS health insurance — Hospitals in Accra
Why the internet figure is believable
72.18% using the internet, up from 0% in 1990, is a real change and it happened on phones rather than on computers. Ghana skipped most of the fixed-line era. That is why so much of ordinary life here runs through MoMo and WhatsApp rather than through a bank’s website.
— Apps to use in Accra — Working in tech in Accra — Every series, charted — How to read Ghanaian statistics
World Bank Open Data, fetched 2026-09-10. All national figures — Ghana does not publish these by region.