Ghana’s rules change without announcing themselves. A fee moves and the sign on the wall does not. An office relocates and the only notice is the queue outside the old one. A levy is repealed in a budget and you are still being charged it three months later because nobody told the person at the counter.
This newsletter is one email a month about what actually changed.
What it will carry
What changed. Fees, forms, offices, deadlines. When a passport fee moves or a permit stops requiring a document it required last year, that is the whole reason this exists.
What a thing costs now. Every figure on this site carries a source and an expiry date, and when one is re-checked against the GRA, SSNIT or PURC, the new number goes here.
Which guides were rewritten, and why. If the law moved, you should know that the guide moved with it.
One thing worth knowing about the month ahead — the rains, the harmattan, the school terms, the holidays that shut every office for a week whether or not you had an appointment. — Weather and seasons — Public holidays
What it will not carry
No sponsorships. No affiliate links. No “10 best neighbourhoods” written by somebody who has not been to any of them. Nothing sold, and your address forwarded to nobody.
If a month passes with nothing worth saying, you will get a short email saying that, or no email at all. A newsletter that has to fill a quota stops being worth opening.
Where the site is, as of this month
- 102 guides, from the rent advance to registering a birth
- 9 calculators, including import duty, vehicle import duty, withholding tax and the WASSCE aggregate — all running in your browser, none of them sending what you type anywhere
- 110 glossary entries, from SSNIT to chale
- An interactive map of Ghana’s 16 regions and Greater Accra’s 29 district assemblies, with all 34 constituencies, 45 landmarks, and layers from the 2021 census — who lives where, and what work they do — See it
Newest this month: reporting broken infrastructure — who owns the street light, the pothole and the billboard, and how to report each so that something happens.
The honest bit
There are 58 figures on this site past their re-check date. The build knows about every one of them and says so, which is the point of dating them in the first place. Working through that list is the main job for the coming months, and each batch that gets verified will be reported here.
If you find a figure that is wrong before I do, that is the single most useful email this site can receive. — Corrections
One thing for the month ahead
September is the start of Accra’s minor rainy season, and the drains that will flood in October are blocked now. If your street has one that is choked, this is the month to report it — a blocked drain reported in September is a report; the same drain in October is a rescue.