There is a particular kind of exhaustion that does not come from laziness. It comes from effort that goes nowhere, from waking up early, working long, hustling hard, and arriving at the end of the month with nothing resembling financial security to show for it. It is the exhaustion of the market trader who has been on her feet since five in the morning and will not make enough to cover school fees.

It is the exhaustion of graduates who spent four years at the university, sent out countless applications, and are now employed as Mobile money business agents in makeshift kiosks across the country, especially in Accra and Kumasi, not because they chose to, but because there was nothing else. This is Ghana’s employment crisis, and it is considerably more complex and considerably more solvable than the political conversation around it has ever honestly acknowledged.

I write this as a Ghanaian who lives and works in England, in a country where the relationship between work, documentation, and economic protection is so embedded in institutional architecture that most people who benefit from it never have to think about it at all. Every person who earns in the United Kingdom is assigned a National Insurance number. Every immigrant with the right to work is issued a share code that makes their status verifiable, their contributions traceable, and their entitlements calculable. The system is imperfect in many ways, but its foundational logic is sound: if you work, you are seen. If you are seen, you are protected. If you are protected, you contribute. Ghana has not yet made that bargain with its own workforce, and the consequences are visible in every underlit market, every overcrowded 'trotro' [Commercial bus], and every pension that cannot sustain the dignified old age it promises.

The Paradox at the Heart of Ghana’s Labour Market

In November 2024, the Ghana Statistical Service released its National Report on Productivity, Employment and Growth, a document that should have generated far more public alarm than it did. Its central finding was stark: eighty per cent of Ghana’s workforce is employed in the informal sector, yet that same sector contributes only 27.4 per cent of GDP. The formal sector, employing just one in five workers, generates the remaining 73 per cent of national output. The report itself described this imbalance as an obvious constraint to the transformational agenda of the country, and a drag on the overall productivity and living standards of the nation.

Eight out of every ten working Ghanaians are, by the standards of their own country’s economic output, operating at a fraction of the productivity they are capable of. They are not idle. They are not failing to try. They are working in conditions without capital, without infrastructure, without institutional support, without documentation that structurally prevents their effort from translating into commensurate income. The problem is not the worker. The problem is the architecture within which the worker operates. And at the centre of that architectural failure sits a documentation gap that Ghana has tolerated for decades while simultaneously wondering why tax revenues remain insufficient, pension coverage remains shallow, and job creation consistently fails to keep pace with a rapidly growing labour force.

Underemployment: The Crisis Ghana Has Learned Not to Name

Ghana’s official unemployment figures, drawn from the Ghana Statistical Service’s 2024 Labour Statistics Bulletin, place the national unemployment rate at approximately 13.4 per cent, with urban areas registering 15.9 per cent and rural areas 10.4 per cent. Youth unemployment is considerably higher. These numbers are troubling, but they do not capture the deeper crisis, which is not unemployment in the conventional sense but underemployment, the condition of being technically occupied whilst earning far below what one’s skills, qualifications, and working hours should reasonably yield.

The graduate driving a taxi is employed. The teacher with a master’s degree running a chop bar because no school would hire her at a salary she could live on is employed. The engineer who spent seven years in university and now does data entry at a salary that would embarrass a junior administrator in Nairobi is employed. Ghana’s employment statistics count all of them as successes. None of them feels like one. The mismatch between educational investment, effort expended, and economic return is not a personal failure of ambition. It is a governance failure of imagination, a failure to build the formal employment ecosystem within which qualifications can be matched to roles, roles can be fairly compensated, and compensation can be reliably documented and protected.

The Documentation Gap and What the Global North Gets Right

This is where the comparison with the United Kingdom, and with the Global North more broadly, becomes not merely illustrative but genuinely instructive. The National Insurance number in the United Kingdom is not a bureaucratic formality. It is the foundational instrument through which a person’s economic existence is made legible to the state. Every pound earned is traceable. Every contribution to the national insurance fund is recorded. Every entitlement to unemployment support, to state pension, to statutory sick pay is calculable precisely because the documentation infrastructure exists to calculate it. For immigrants, the share code serves an equivalent function: it makes the right to work verifiable, the tax obligation transparent, and the social contract between the worker and the state enforceable in both directions. The genius of this architecture is not that it is punitive. It is that it is mutual. The state sees you, and in return, the state is obliged to protect you. That mutuality is the foundation of a functioning welfare state and a solvent public treasury.

Ghana has the Ghana Card, the Tax Identification Number, and the SSNIT number. What it lacks is the compulsory, universal integration of these instruments into the daily reality of economic participation. In the United Kingdom, no employer can legally pay a worker without a National Insurance number. In Ghana, 92.3 per cent of all businesses, as documented by the Ghana Statistical Service’s 2024 Integrated Business Establishment Survey, operate informally, keeping no formal accounts and making no mandatory contributions to any tax or pension system. The instruments exist. The mandate to use them universally does not, and without that mandate, the instruments remain aspirational rather than transformational. A Ghana Card that is optional for economic participation is not a social contract. It is a laminated aspiration.

SSNIT and the Pension Coverage Problem

The pension coverage gap is perhaps the starkest expression of what the documentation failure costs ordinary Ghanaians in tangible, long-term terms. SSNIT, Ghana’s Social Security and National Insurance Trust, operates a contributory three-tier pension system. The mandatory first and second tiers cover 20 per cent. The self-employed and informal sector workers, representing the remaining 80 per cent of the workforce, are covered only voluntarily. SSNIT’s SEED initiative, the Self-Employed Enrolment Drive, launched in 2023, had enrolled approximately 103,292 self-employed individuals by mid-2024, a figure the government extended to 600,000 by early 2025. In a country where the informal workforce numbers in the millions, these figures represent meaningful beginnings but not structural transformation.

The consequence of this coverage gap is not abstract. It is the market woman who works for forty years with no pension to show for it, entirely dependent on family support in old age. It is the artisan in Tema who builds Ghana’s infrastructure with his hands and retires into destitution because the system was never designed to see him. The minimum monthly SSNIT pension in 2025 stands at GH₵396.58, following a 12 per cent indexation, an amount that, when set against Accra’s cost of living, represents not retirement dignity but retirement precarity. Those who need pensions the most are precisely those whom the system has historically been least equipped to reach.

What Ghana Can Learn — And What It Must Build

The path forward is not to import the UK’s National Insurance system wholesale —Ghana’s economic conditions, administrative capacity, and informality levels require a distinctly Ghanaian solution. But the foundational logic of universal documentation is transferable. Every Ghanaian who earns an income, regardless of the sector in which they earn it, should be visible to the state. Not as a surveillance objective but as a social contract obligation so that the state can fulfil its side of the bargain: ensuring that effort is rewarded with protection, that contribution is matched with entitlement, and that a lifetime of work does not end in invisible poverty.

The GhanaCard, now linked to the SSNIT number and the Tax Identification Number, provides the technical infrastructure for this. The Mobile Money ecosystem, through which millions of informal transactions already flow digitally and traceably, provides the delivery mechanism. What is required is the political will to make registration and contribution mandatory across sectors gradually, sequentially, beginning with the largest informal operators and working downward rather than continuing to treat formalisation as an aspirational programme rather than a structural imperative.

Simultaneously, the quality of formal employment must improve. Job creation in Ghana has long suffered from what development economists call jobless growth, the economy expands without generating commensurate formal employment. Between 2006 and 2021, Ghana’s economy tripled in size while the employment rate declined from 68.8 per cent to 50 per cent, according to the UNDP’s 2023 Ghana National Human Development Report.

Growth that does not employ people, and employment that does not pay people enough to live, are two sides of the same structural failure. Addressing both simultaneously requires an industrial policy that deliberately prioritises sectors with high formal employment potential, manufacturing, commercial agriculture, and digitally-enabled services, alongside labour market regulation that sets enforceable minimum wage floors and mandates documentation as a condition of operation.

Young Ghanaians are not failing the economy. The economy has not yet been built to accommodate them adequately. The graduate who overshoots every job she applies for, the artisan who works without a pension, the trader who earns without a tax record, none of them is the problem. They are evidence of a system that has not yet decided to see its own people clearly, document them honestly, and protect them structurally.

Ghana cannot afford to keep working in the dark. The instruments exist. The precedents from comparable middle-income economies exist. The mobile infrastructure that could make universal enrolment operationally feasible already exists in the pockets of millions of Ghanaians. The political will is the remaining variable, and it is the one that only Ghanaians themselves, citizens, workers, organised labour, and policymakers alike can supply. A country that documents every sim card registration but not every income earned has its priorities precisely inverted.

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About the Author

Dominic Senayah is an International Relations professional and policy analyst based in England, specialising in African political economy, humanitarian governance, and migration diplomacy. He holds an MA in International Relations from the UK. He writes on trade policy, institutional reform, and Ghana–UK relations for audiences across Africa, the United Kingdom, and the wider Global South.