Abena wakes at 5:30 in the morning in Madina, a suburb of Accra. She is 34 years old. She sells fabric at the market, supports two children, and sends money to her father, a cocoa farmer in the Eastern Region. Nothing about her day will make the news. And that is exactly why her day matters.
Because from the moment she wakes to the moment she sleeps, Abena will pass through at least six global systems. She did not design any of them. She cannot vote on any of them. She has never seen the buildings where they are controlled. But every one of them will take something from her before the sun goes down.
Follow her. Watch closely. This is how the world actually works.
6:00 AM; The Money Transfer
Abena’s sister lives in London. Last night she sent £100 home to help with school fees. This morning Abena checks her phone: the money has arrived, minus the cost of sending it. Sending money to sub-Saharan Africa costs more than sending money anywhere else on earth, an average of around 8 percent, against a global target of 3 percent.
The money passes through correspondent banks, clearing systems, and payment networks headquartered in New York, London, and Brussels. None of them are African. All of them take a cut. Africans abroad send home more money each year than the entire continent receives in foreign aid. The system that carries this lifeline charges the world’s poorest senders the world’s highest fees.
Who controls this system? Western banks and payment networks. Who benefits? Their shareholders. Who pays? Abena’s sister, and millions like her.
7:15 AM; The Fuel Queue
Abena boards a trotro to the market. The fare went up again last month, because fuel went up again last month. Here is the strange part: Ghana produces crude oil. It has been pumping oil from the Jubilee Field since 2010. But Ghana refines almost none of it.
The crude sails away in tankers; the refined petrol sails back at world prices, priced in dollars, shaped by wars and decisions in places Abena has never been. When conflict in the Middle East pushed oil past $100 a barrel this year, her trotro fare rose within weeks, in a country that exports oil.
Who controls this system? Global commodity markets and the owners of refineries abroad. Who benefits? The traders and refiners. Who pays? Every passenger in the trotro.
9:00 AM; Her Father’s Cocoa
At the market, Abena calls her father. He has farmed cocoa for forty years. The price he receives is not set on his farm, or even in Ghana. Cocoa is priced on exchanges in London and New York. Ghana grows some of the finest cocoa in the world but processes only about a quarter of it.
The bean leaves at one price; the chocolate bar returns at ten times that price. The value, the grinding, the branding, and the retail is captured in Europe. Her father grows gold and lives on crumbs. He has never tasted the finished chocolate made from his own harvest.
Who controls this system? Commodity exchanges and multinational processors. Who benefits? The chocolate companies. Who pays? The farmer, for forty years.
12:30 PM; The Hospital
At midday, Abena takes her son to a public clinic. The queue is long; the medicines are short. She blames the government, and she is not entirely wrong. But there is a number behind the queue that few people ever see. When Ghana borrows money on international markets, the interest rate it pays is decided largely by three private companies in New York: Moody’s, S&P, and Fitch. Together they rate about 95 percent of the world’s debt. In 2024, African countries paid roughly 9 percent interest on their dollar bonds. Emerging Asia paid 4.7 percent.
A United Nations study found that two countries with the same debt levels, the same reserves, and the same growth can receive different ratings, and pay different prices, largely because of where they are on the map. The gap costs Africa an estimated $75 billion every year. That is more than double what the continent receives in aid.
Eleven of the world’s fifteen fastest-growing economies in 2025 were African. Yet Africa pays more to borrow than any region on earth. And in February 2026, S&P published a report on African credit in which Burundi was labelled as Uganda, and Sudan and South Sudan, separate countries since 2011 appeared as one.
These are the institutions grading a continent they cannot correctly label. Every extra percentage point Ghana pays to borrow is a clinic that is not built, a nurse who is not hired, a medicine that is not on the shelf when Abena’s son needs it.
Who controls this system? Three rating agencies and the markets that follow them. Who benefits? The lenders collecting the premium. Who pays? A boy in a queue at a clinic in Madina.
4:00 PM; The Visa
In the afternoon, Abena helps her nephew complete a visa application. He has been invited to a technology conference in Europe, his work, his talent, his invitation. The application costs money he may never get back, requires documents proving he is not a risk, and may still end in refusal without explanation.
A German or American passport holder can enter most of the world freely. A Ghanaian passport opens far fewer doors. Talent is global, but movement is not. The system of borders and visas quietly sorts the world’s people into those who are welcome and those who must apply, pay, and wait.
Who controls this system? The governments of wealthy states. Who benefits? Those born inside the right borders. Who pays? A talented young man with the wrong passport.
The Pattern Behind the Day
Money, fuel, crops, credit, movement. Five different systems, one identical design. In each one, the rules are written far from the people they govern. In each one, the value flows in one direction and the costs flow in the other. And in each one, the system presents itself as neutral, as simply “how things work.” This is the most important thing to understand about systems: they are not weather.
They are not natural. Every one of them was built by people, at a particular moment in history, to serve particular interests. Most of the systems governing Abena’s day were built in the 1940s and 1950s, when most of Africa was still colonised and had no seat at the table. The systems have been updated since. The seating arrangement has not.
Africa is not poor because Africans do not work. Abena is up at 5:30. Her father has farmed for forty years. Her nephew’s skills earned an invitation across the world. Africa is bled by design, through fees, premiums, price structures, and permissions, one ordinary day at a time, multiplied by a billion people.
What Is Already Changing
Here is what should give us more than hope, it should give us direction. Africa has stopped merely complaining about the systems and has started building its own.
An African Credit Rating Agency has been launched under the African Union, with its first sovereign ratings expected in 2026, built to rate African economies with African data, challenging the three-company monopoly in New York. The African Continental Free Trade Area is slowly stitching 54 markets into one, so that value can circulate inside the continent instead of constantly leaking out. Ghana has mandated that at least half of its cocoa be processed at home from next season.
Pan-African payment systems are being built to move money across the continent without passing through Brussels or New York. And at the United Nations, at the G20, and at Davos, African leaders are demanding, in the language of resolutions, not requests, a redesign of the global financial architecture.
None of this will change Abena’s tomorrow. But it can change her daughter’s decade. Systems built by people can be rebuilt by people. That is not a slogan. It is the entire lesson of history.
At 10 o’clock at night, Abena counts her earnings, sets aside the school fees, and sleeps. She has done nothing wrong today. She has worked, saved, cared, and endured. The systems took their share anyway, quietly, invisibly, the way they always do. The first step to changing a system is refusing to believe it is natural. The second is naming who controls it, who benefits from it, and who pays for it. The third is building the alternative.
Africa has finished the first step. It has begun the second. The century ahead will be decided by the third, and by whether we build fast enough for the Abenas who wake at 5:30 tomorrow.
By Obed Kog
The writer is a Graduate Student in International Relations and Diplomacy, GIMPA | Public Policy Analyst
Ghanaian researcher focused on international relations, diplomacy, trade, and development policy.
