EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Ghana stands at a historic crossroads. As the nation boldly pursues its vision of a 24-hour economy — an economy that thrives around the clock, generates employment continuously, and integrates fully into global supply chains — the question of infrastructure strategy becomes not merely technical but existential. For decades, Ghana has invested disproportionately in roads and road transport.
While roads remain essential, an overreliance on this single mode of transport has exacted enormous costs: thousands of lives lost annually, staggering economic losses from road accidents, crippling urban congestion, severe environmental degradation, and a freight system that is structurally ill-suited to the demands of a modern, competitive economy.
This article makes a compelling, evidence-based case that Ghana’s path to sustainable development, economic resilience, and social equity runs along steel rails. A strategic, phased, and nationally committed pivot towards rail — passenger and freight — is not a luxury. It is an economic imperative, a public health emergency response, an environmental obligation, and a national security necessity. The time for bold decisions is now.
- INTRODUCTION: GHANA’S TRANSPORT CROSSROADS
Ghana’s economy is dynamic, growing, and ambitious. The government’s commitment to a 24-hour economy envisions continuous industrial activity, expanded agro-processing, vibrant port operations, seamless logistics chains, and a population that can move safely and affordably at all hours. Yet this vision is being undercut by a transport infrastructure anchored almost entirely on roads that are overstretched, under-maintained, and increasingly dangerous.
The National Road Safety Authority (NRSA) reports that road traffic accidents claim approximately 2,200 lives every year — a figure widely believed to be significantly underreported. Ghana’s road network, while extensive, suffers from chronic maintenance deficits. The trunk road network alone requires billions of cedis in rehabilitation annually. Meanwhile, the country’s rail network — once a jewel of colonial-era infrastructure connecting mines, farms, and ports — lies largely dormant, a victim of decades of neglect, policy indifference, and a misguided belief that roads alone can carry a nation forward.
The choice between ‘more roads’ and ‘rolling stock on rails’ is not binary — both are needed. But the weight of evidence from economics, public health, environmental science, urban planning, and national security all point in the same direction: Ghana must urgently, strategically, and decisively invest in its rail sector if it is to build an economy that is not only active 24 hours a day, but that is safe, clean, inclusive, and globally competitive.
- THE ECONOMIC CASE: RAIL AS THE ENGINE OF THE 24-HOUR ECONOMY
2.1 Freight Efficiency and Competitiveness
The economics of freight transport are unambiguous: rail moves bulk goods at a fraction of the cost per tonne-kilometre compared to road transport. In mature economies, rail freight costs are typically 3 to 5 times lower per unit than road haulage for comparable distances. For Ghana’s mining sector — gold, bauxite, manganese — its agricultural sector, and its growing industrial base, this cost differential is transformational.
Currently, Ghana loses enormous value because commodity producers must rely on truck haulage over distances where rail would be far more economical. The Accra-Kumasi-Takoradi triangle — the economic heartland of Ghana — was once served by a rail network precisely because the colonial administrators understood the economics. Restoring and modernising this corridor alone would dramatically reduce the cost of doing business for hundreds of enterprises.
A 24-hour economy requires logistics systems that can operate continuously and reliably. Rail systems, by their nature, are schedulable, high-capacity, and weather-resilient in ways that road transport is not. A single freight train can carry the equivalent of 60 to 80 trucks’ worth of cargo. For bauxite transportation from Awaso to Takoradi, for timber movement, for agricultural produce from the Northern regions — rail is not merely an alternative. It is the only economically rational option at scale.
2.2 Port Efficiency and the Tema-Accra Corridor
The Port of Tema is Ghana’s primary gateway to global trade, handling millions of tonnes of cargo annually. Yet the evacuation of cargo from Tema is almost entirely road-dependent, creating chronic congestion on the Tema motorway and surrounding arterials. This congestion imposes direct economic costs — fuel waste, driver time, perishable goods spoilage, and delayed industrial inputs — that run into hundreds of millions of cedis annually.
A dedicated rail freight link between Tema Port and inland dry ports and logistics hubs would dramatically improve port efficiency, reduce dwell times, slash congestion costs, and make Ghana’s trade gateway more competitive compared to Abidjan and Lagos. In the context of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), this competitiveness advantage is not abstract — it directly determines whether Ghana becomes a preferred hub for continental trade or a peripheral player.
2.3 Tourism and Passenger Revenue
Rail tourism is a significant and growing economic opportunity. Countries from Switzerland to South Africa generate substantial tourism revenue from scenic rail journeys. Ghana’s diverse landscape — from the Volta Region to the coast, from Ashanti forests to the savannah north — offers extraordinary potential for tourism rail products. An Accra-Cape Coast-Takoradi coastal rail line, for example, would simultaneously serve commuters, stimulate tourism along Ghana’s Heritage Coast, and reduce road accident risk for the thousands who travel this corridor daily.
In the context of a 24-hour economy, passenger rail enables workers to travel safely during early morning and late evening hours when road accident risk is highest. It enables shift workers in industrial zones, hospital staff, market traders, and students to commute affordably and predictably — unlocking productive hours that are currently lost to exhaustion, accident fear, or simply the inability to travel safely at night.
2.4 Employment Creation
Rail investment is a powerful direct and indirect job creator. Direct employment spans engineering, operations, maintenance, station management, catering, security, and logistics. Indirect employment multipliers are even larger: rail corridors stimulate commercial activity along their routes, enable agro-processing facilities to locate near railheads, and open up previously isolated communities to market participation. Studies from comparable developing economies suggest that every dollar invested in rail infrastructure generates 3 to 5 dollars in broader economic activity.
For Ghana, where youth unemployment is a persistent structural challenge, a national rail development programme is simultaneously an infrastructure project and a human capital development programme — creating skilled, dignified, and sustainable employment at scale.
- THE ROAD SAFETY CRISIS: A NATIONAL EMERGENCY
3.1 The Toll of Road Traffic Accidents
As a Road Safety Advocate, I have spent years confronting the devastating human and economic consequences of Ghana’s road traffic accident epidemic. The statistics are stark: Ghana loses approximately 2,200 lives every year on its roads. The true figure, accounting for deaths that occur after hospital admission, is likely higher. Road traffic injuries are the leading cause of death among Ghanaians aged 15 to 44 — the most economically productive segment of the population.
The World Health Organisation estimates that road traffic accidents cost Ghana between 1.6% and 2% of GDP annually. In a country with a GDP of approximately USD 75 billion, this represents a loss of USD 1.2 to 1.5 billion every year — funds that could build hospitals, schools, water systems, and yes, railways. This is not merely an accident statistic. It is a development crisis.
3.2 The Safety Mathematics of Rail
Rail transport is statistically between 10 and 40 times safer per passenger kilometre than road transport, depending on the comparison context. This is not a marginal difference — it is a difference of an order of magnitude. The physics are straightforward: trains run on fixed tracks, are operated by trained professionals, are subject to rigorous maintenance and inspection regimes, and do not share their right-of-way with the chaotic, variable, and unpredictable conditions of public roads.
In Ghana, a significant proportion of fatal road accidents involve heavy commercial vehicles — trucks and articulated lorries — that are fundamentally incompatible with the road standards they traverse. Every tonne of freight shifted from road to rail is a reduction in the risk exposure of every other road user. The relationship is direct, measurable, and profound.
3.3 Vulnerable Road Users and the 24-Hour Risk Window
Ghana’s road fatality profile reveals a disproportionate toll on vulnerable road users — pedestrians, motorcyclists, and passengers in minibuses. These are overwhelmingly low-income Ghanaians who cannot afford private vehicles and depend on public transport. They are also the workers who, in a 24-hour economy, will be travelling at night to reach factories, hospitals, markets, and logistics hubs.
The night-time road environment in Ghana is extraordinarily dangerous: poor lighting, speeding vehicles, poorly maintained vehicles without functioning lights, and road surfaces that deteriorate rapidly under heavy traffic. Offering these workers a safe, reliable, lighted, and affordable rail alternative is not merely a transport policy choice — it is a moral and social justice imperative.
- THE HEALTH DIMENSION: BEYOND ACCIDENT MORTALITY
4.1 Air Quality and Respiratory Disease
Ghana’s urban centres, particularly Accra and Kumasi, suffer from severe air pollution, with road transport being the dominant source of particulate matter and nitrogen oxides. The World Bank has identified Accra as one of the most polluted cities in sub-Saharan Africa. Studies conducted in Ghanaian urban areas have linked road traffic emissions to elevated rates of respiratory disease, cardiovascular conditions, and adverse birth outcomes.
Electric rail systems produce zero direct emissions. Even diesel-powered rail produces dramatically lower emissions per passenger-kilometre than road transport. A transition towards rail-based urban mass transit — metro systems, light rail, commuter rail — would deliver measurable improvements in urban air quality within years, with corresponding reductions in healthcare costs and improvements in quality of life.
4.2 Noise Pollution and Mental Health
Road traffic noise is a chronically underappreciated public health burden. Prolonged exposure to traffic noise is associated with elevated stress hormones, sleep disturbance, impaired cognitive development in children, and increased cardiovascular risk. In dense urban areas along Ghana’s major road corridors, millions of residents are exposed to harmful noise levels daily.
Rail infrastructure, particularly where it is grade-separated or routed away from dense residential areas, generates a different and generally lower noise footprint than equivalent road traffic volumes. Urban planning that integrates rail as the primary mass transit mode allows road traffic — and its associated noise — to be substantially reduced.
4.3 Physical and Mental Health Benefits of Reliable Transit
Access to reliable, affordable public transport is a social determinant of health. When workers can commute predictably, they arrive less stressed, better rested, and more productive. When patients can reach healthcare facilities reliably — including during night hours when road transport is most dangerous — health outcomes improve. When students can reach schools safely, educational attainment rises. Rail, as a reliable, high-capacity, scheduled form of public transit, delivers all these health co-benefits in ways that road transport, inherently subject to congestion, accident, and unpredictability, cannot.
- THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMPERATIVE: RAIL AND CLIMATE RESILIENCE
5.1 Carbon Emissions and Ghana’s Climate Commitments
Ghana has committed under the Paris Agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and transition to a low-carbon economy. The transport sector is one of the largest and fastest-growing sources of emissions in Ghana, driven overwhelmingly by road transport. Rail, particularly where powered by renewable energy — solar and hydro, of which Ghana has abundant resources — offers a pathway to near-zero-emission freight and passenger transport.
As global carbon pricing mechanisms mature and as trading partners in Europe and North America increasingly impose carbon border adjustment mechanisms, Ghana’s industrial competitiveness will depend in part on the carbon intensity of its logistics. Rail freight powered by Ghana’s renewable energy potential is a long-term competitiveness asset, not merely an environmental gesture.
5.2 Land Use and Deforestation
Roads are voracious consumers of land. A dual carriageway consumes approximately 3 to 5 hectares per kilometre of corridor, not including interchange areas, service roads, and the broader land use changes induced by road construction. In Ghana’s forest zones, road construction has been a primary driver of deforestation, both directly and by opening access for illegal logging, galamsey, and encroachment.
Rail infrastructure, by contrast, occupies a narrow, defined right-of-way. A double-track railway carries vastly more freight and passengers per hectare of land consumed than any road equivalent. In sensitive ecological areas — the Atewa Forest Reserve, the riparian zones of the Volta, the forest-savannah transition belt — rail offers a far less ecologically damaging option for opening economic corridors.
5.3 Road Damage and Material Costs
Heavy road transport is extraordinarily destructive of road surfaces. The damage caused by a single loaded articulated truck is equivalent to the damage caused by tens of thousands of passenger car axle passes. Ghana’s chronic road maintenance deficit is not primarily a funding problem — it is a physics problem. Roads under heavy freight traffic deteriorate far faster than maintenance budgets can address.
Rail infrastructure, carrying the same tonne-kilometres on steel wheels on steel rails, exerts a fraction of the surface stress. The lifecycle maintenance cost per tonne-kilometre for rail is substantially lower than for road. Redirecting bulk freight from road to rail is, therefore, not only environmentally beneficial but fiscally rational.
- SOCIAL EQUITY AND NATIONAL INTEGRATION
6.1 Connecting the North and the South
One of Ghana’s most persistent developmental challenges is the economic and social disparity between the northern and southern regions. This disparity is, in significant measure, an infrastructure disparity. Northern Ghana — with its agricultural potential in soya, shea, yams, and livestock — is separated from southern markets, ports, and processing facilities by road distances that impose prohibitive logistics costs.
A north-south rail corridor, connecting Tamale, Kumasi, and Accra-Tema, would be transformational. It would slash the cost of moving agricultural produce to markets and ports, enable cold chain logistics that are currently impossible over long road distances, attract agro-processing investment to the north, and provide affordable passenger transport to millions of Ghanaians who currently face a choice between expensive, dangerous, and exhausting road journeys or effective immobility.
6.2 Gender and Inclusive Mobility
Women in Ghana bear a disproportionate burden of transport disadvantage. Women are more likely to rely on public transport, more likely to be pedestrians, and more vulnerable to the safety risks of late-night travel. A safe, affordable, and frequent rail system disproportionately benefits women — enabling them to access employment, healthcare, education, and markets with greater safety and lower cost.
In the context of a 24-hour economy, which will inevitably require workers across all genders to travel during non-traditional hours, the provision of safe and dignified public transport is a gender equity issue, not merely a transport planning consideration.
6.3 Disability and Universal Access
Rail infrastructure, when designed to modern accessibility standards, is inherently more accessible to persons with disabilities than road transport. Flat boarding platforms, wide doors, audio-visual information systems, and level-access carriages make rail the most inclusive form of mass public transport. As Ghana advances its commitments under the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, rail investment offers an opportunity to build accessibility into the fabric of the nation’s transport system from the ground up.
- URBAN PLANNING AND DECONGESTION
7.1 The Accra Congestion Crisis
Greater Accra is in the grip of a transport crisis. Daily congestion on the major arterials — Spintex Road, the Motorway, Liberation Road, George Walker Bush Highway — costs the city billions of cedis in lost productivity annually. Commuters spend hours in traffic that degrades quality of life, increases stress, burns fuel, and generates pollution. The crisis is structural: a city of 4 to 5 million people served primarily by road transport and trotro minibuses cannot function efficiently, regardless of how many roads are built.
The evidence from every major city that has invested in rail-based mass transit is consistent: rail transforms urban mobility. The Accra Light Rail Transit project, if realised and extended, would not merely move people — it would reshape land use, concentrate development around stations, reduce the demand for road space, and make Accra a more liveable, productive, and globally competitive city.
7.2 Transit-Oriented Development
Rail investment is the most powerful tool available to urban planners for concentrating development, reducing sprawl, and creating walkable, mixed-use communities. Transit-oriented development (TOD) — the clustering of housing, employment, and amenities around rail stations — has revitalised cities from Curitiba to Copenhagen to Kigali.
For Ghana, TOD offers a path to managing urban growth in a way that does not simply extend the road network indefinitely into the urban fringe, consuming agricultural land and generating ever-longer, ever-more-dangerous commutes. Every cedis invested in rail infrastructure, if accompanied by appropriate land use planning, generates multiples of its value in surrounding property development, commercial activity, and tax revenue.
- NATIONAL SECURITY AND STRATEGIC RESILIENCE
8.1 Fuel Import Dependency
Ghana’s road transport sector is almost entirely dependent on imported petroleum products — petrol and diesel. This dependency represents a significant macroeconomic vulnerability. Currency depreciation, global oil price spikes, and supply disruptions all translate directly into transport cost increases that ripple through the entire economy, hitting food prices, industrial costs, and household budgets.
Rail, particularly electric rail powered by domestically generated electricity from Ghana’s hydro and solar resources, dramatically reduces this dependency. A Ghana that moves its freight and passengers primarily by electric rail is a Ghana that has partially insulated itself from the volatility of global oil markets. In an era of accelerating energy transition, this strategic positioning has both economic and geopolitical value.
8.2 Military and Emergency Logistics
Rail infrastructure has historically been a critical component of national defence and emergency response. The ability to move large volumes of equipment, supplies, and personnel rapidly across the country is a capability that roads, subject to accident, congestion, and surface deterioration, cannot reliably provide. A functional national rail network enhances Ghana’s capacity to respond to natural disasters, epidemics, and security challenges — a lesson reinforced by COVID-19, when supply chain disruptions on road networks created critical shortages.
- POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS: A RAIL-LED DEVELOPMENT AGENDA
9.1 Institutional Reform
The Ghana Railway Development Authority (GRDA) must be resourced, empowered, and held accountable as a strategic national institution. A dedicated Rail Development Fund, capitalised through a levy on road freight haulage (reflecting the externalities imposed by heavy vehicles on road infrastructure), should be established to provide predictable, long-term financing for rail development.
9.2 Priority Corridors
Ghana should designate and commit to developing the following priority rail corridors as national projects of strategic importance:
- Western Corridor: Takoradi – Kumasi – Paga (enabling mining, agriculture, and northern connectivity)
- Eastern Corridor: Accra – Kumasi – Tamale (the economic spine of Ghana)
- Coastal Corridor: Accra – Cape Coast – Takoradi (tourism, commuter, and port logistics)
- Accra Urban Rail: Light rail and commuter rail network for Greater Accra
- Tema Port Rail Link: Dedicated freight rail connection between Tema Port and inland logistics hubs
9.3 Public-Private Partnerships
Ghana should proactively engage international rail operators, infrastructure investors, and development finance institutions — the African Development Bank, the World Bank, the Export-Import Bank of China, the European Investment Bank — in structured public-private partnership arrangements for rail development. The government’s role is to provide the regulatory framework, the right-of-way, and the political commitment. Private capital can provide the rolling stock, station development, and operational expertise.
9.4 Road Safety Integration
Every kilometre of rail freight capacity added reduces the number of heavy trucks on Ghana’s roads. Road safety planning should explicitly incorporate rail development as a primary intervention — not merely a transport planning consideration. The National Road Safety Authority, the Ministry of Transport, and the GRDA should develop a joint framework that quantifies and tracks the road safety benefits of modal shift from road to rail.
9.5 Local Content and Technology Transfer
Rail development in Ghana must be anchored in a robust local content framework. Ghana has the technical universities, the engineering talent, and the manufacturing base to develop rail maintenance capabilities, signalling expertise, and eventually locomotive and rolling stock manufacturing. A rail development programme that builds these capabilities is an industrial policy as much as a transport policy.
- ADDRESSING OBJECTIONS: THE CASE AGAINST ROAD OVER-RELIANCE
Proponents of continued road-centric investment often cite three arguments: cost, flexibility, and network coverage. Each deserves a direct response.
On cost: The upfront capital cost of rail is higher than for equivalent road capacity. But lifecycle cost analysis — accounting for maintenance, accidents, fuel, emissions, and congestion externalities — consistently shows rail to be the more economical option for high-volume corridors. Ghana has been paying the full lifecycle cost of road dependency for decades without acknowledging it on any balance sheet.
On flexibility: Roads offer point-to-point flexibility that rail cannot match. This is true and important. The argument is not that roads should be abandoned — it is that the current balance is catastrophically skewed. The optimal transport system uses rail for high-volume, medium-to-long-distance freight and passenger flows, and roads for first-mile, last-mile, and low-volume connections. Ghana currently has almost none of the rail component.
On network coverage: Ghana’s rail network once extended to most major economic centres. It was not abandoned because it failed — it was abandoned because of a combination of political decisions, World Bank structural adjustment conditionalities that deprioritised rail, and the short-term seduction of road construction contracts. The network can be rebuilt. The institutional knowledge has not entirely disappeared. The economic case for doing so has never been stronger.
- CONCLUSION: THE RAILS ARE THE ROADS TO TOMORROW
Ghana’s ambition for a 24-hour economy is visionary and achievable. But it cannot be built on a foundation of roads alone. The economic losses from accidents, the health burden of pollution, the environmental cost of deforestation and carbon emissions, the social inequity of a transport system that fails the poor, the strategic vulnerability of oil dependency, and the planning catastrophe of unchecked urban sprawl — all of these crises have a common solution, a solution that has been proven in every developed economy and in every emerging economy that has achieved the leap to sustained, broad-based prosperity.
That solution runs on steel rails.
The time for Ghana to make this choice is not tomorrow. It is not next year. It is now, while the African Continental Free Trade Area is reshaping the logistics of an entire continent, while climate finance is available for low-carbon infrastructure, while a young generation of Ghanaian engineers and planners is ready to build, and while the human cost of road dependency continues to mount with every passing week.
As someone who has spent years at the intersection of safety, environment, and development — and as a custodian of traditional values that place the wellbeing of community above short-term convenience — I call upon Ghana’s government, private sector, civil society, and international partners to make a bold, irreversible, and historic commitment:
Lay the tracks. Run the trains. Save the lives. Build the economy. Protect the environment.
The rails are not just the roads of tomorrow. They are the spine of a Ghana that works for everyone — at every hour of the day and night.
Written By Nana Annor Amihere II
(The writer is the Immediate Past President of the Ghana Institute of Safety and Environmental Professionals (GISP) (2016 to 2022), Renowned Road Safety Advocate and a Traditional Ruler)
