A survey conducted by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) in 2024 has shown that power outages resulted a significant negative impact on both businesses and household activities.

The survey showed that about 70.7% of businesses and 61.5% of households reported that power outages have major or severe effects on their business activities.

“The effect on businesses is more severe when compared to that of households. About 64.5% of respondents indicated that the effect of power outages in the year 2024 included damage to their electrical appliances and or financial losses to their business or both,” Head of Survey at the IEA, Samuel Manu, revealed.

Mr. Manu said the power outages show that “dumsor” has brought untold hardship to most people in the Greater Accra region.

He explained that most consumers suffered losses in damaged goods.

“The cost of Dumsor in Ghana goes beyond a simple decline in GDP— it includes the sufferings of individuals and small businesses in the form of appliance damages and financial losses.

Purpose of Survey

Mr. Manu stated that the survey is aimed at finding out the experiences of Ghanaian businesses and households’ days after the president’s declaration that Dumsor was over.

The survey enquired about the frequency of the outages, their duration, effects on businesses and household equipment, and consumer expectations about future supply of power.

It would also feed into the search for a lasting solution to power outages in the context of a stakeholder forum that IEA intends to organise in the coming weeks.

On the question of how often businesses and households experienced power outages, the results showed that about 94% of respondents experienced various degrees of power outages ranging from 1 time to more than 7 times within the week.

Overall, 75.4% of respondents experienced power outages at least 3 times in the week, with about 19% recording 7 or more times power outages. The calculated average outage per week is approximately 4 times. These figures show significant outages across the Greater Accra Region even after the president declared Dumsor was over.

“An average of four power outages in a week which last for 7 to 4 hours cannot be attributed to to mere faulty transformers, as claimed by utility providers. It definitely has element of low electricity production and supply. Therefore, we conclude that ‘Dumor’ persisted even after the president made a bold declaration that ‘Dumsor’ was over and will never return”, he emphasized.

 Further analysis of the data revealed that the situation for businesses is not different from that of households, as both are experiencing a similar number of outages in a week.