Building Markets or Building Capacity? Rethinking Ghana’s Path to a 24-Hour Economy
By E. A. Randolph-Koranteng (Rev)
Author of the Book (Tomorrow Happened Yesterday) on Amazon.com
The government’s plan for a 24-hour economy is ambitious and deserves credit for its intentions. Creating jobs and cutting down unemployment is something every Ghanaian can get behind. But looking at the strategy—specifically the heavy investment in building central markets in every constituency—I have to wonder if we’re actually fixing the problem or just the symptoms.
Markets are useful, sure, but they’re just places to move goods, not places that create them. You can’t keep a 24-hour economy going just by having more stalls. It needs a foundation of actual production. If we focus on building market stalls instead of our ability to produce things, we might just end up with a lot of empty shelves that happen to stay open all night.
The Numbers Tell a Clear Story
The data is pretty blunt here. Ghana’s import bill hit USD 15.4 billion in 2024. Non-oil imports rose to USD 12.3 billion in 2025. And within those massive numbers, food imports alone cost us about GHS 38.95 billion last year. That’s money that should be circulating inside Ghana, if only we actually grew and made what we eat.
Look at rice. In 2024, Ghana spent GHS 1.98 billion on milled rice and another billion on broken rice. We’re expected to import around 950,000 tonnes this year. But here’s the kicker: less than 3% of our farmland is used for rice. Thailand uses about half of its land for it, and Vietnam uses even more. Those countries aren’t just feeding themselves; they’re getting rich exporting it. Our rice yields are barely half of what farmers get in Vietnam. It isn’t that we can’t do it—it’s that we haven’t made it a priority.
Then there are tomatoes. We need about 800,000 metric tonnes a year, but we only grow about half that. We spent over USD 22 million importing tomatoes in 2024, mostly from Burkina Faso. It’s an economic problem, and it’s also a security risk.
Total food imports went up by nearly 18% recently. We’re spending billions on things like frozen chicken and sugar—products we are more than capable of producing ourselves.
The Manufacturing Reality
And then there’s the manufacturing sector. This should be the engine of the country, processing crops and creating stable jobs. Instead, it’s basically standing still. In 1980, manufacturing was 7.8% of our GDP. Today, it’s 9.8%. In forty-four years, we’ve barely moved the needle.
The agriculture sector employs a huge chunk of our people and adds about 22% to the GDP, but it’s only growing at 2.9%. The potential is huge, obviously, but potential doesn’t mean much without real investment.
A Different Path Forward
The idea of a 24-hour economy isn’t wrong. But the idea that building more markets will get us there feels flawed. Markets without products are just empty space. Real 24-hour activity comes from factories running night shifts, farms using irrigation to grow all year, and processing plants running at full steam.
We lose somewhere between 30% and 50% of our tomato harvests because we can’t store or process them. It’s such a waste. We need processing factories to handle that surplus. We need rice mills and poultry plants. This is the infrastructure that actually turns raw crops into finished products—things we can export or use to replace the stuff we currently buy from abroad.
Every dollar we spend on imported chicken or rice is a dollar leaving our borders. If we produce these here, the money stays here and builds wealth for Ghanaians. That USD 17.4 billion import bill is a map of missed opportunities, I guess.
Markets mostly create informal, often insecure trading jobs. Factories and processing plants create “real” industrial jobs—reliable hours, better pay, and the kind of shift work that makes a 24-hour economy actually function.
Conclusion
There’s an old saying about not destroying what feeds you. In Ghana, our “tree” is our productive capacity—the land and the farmers and the potential to build things. If we spend billions on market buildings while ignoring the farms and factories, we risk building beautiful structures that showcase our poverty rather than our prosperity.
If we just leave the 24-hour economy to the markets, we end up with nothing more than a 24-hour trading floor. But if we actually build it around production, then we’re talking about real, 24-hour prosperity. Honestly, the choice is pretty simple. Do we want to be a country that just trades things back and forth, or do we want to be a nation that actually makes things? Looking at the data, it seems like we can’t have it both ways. Not unless we start shifting our priorities around. Maybe it’s time to decide what matters more.
Let’s focus on the factories and the farms and the processing. If we have something worth selling, the markets and the traders will take care of themselves. That’s just how it works.
Ghana has the land and the water and the people to do the actual work. We need to build this 24-hour economy on something real, like production. Building it on the sand of empty market stalls just won’t work. Anything else isn’t really a vision. It’s just a costly distraction, honestly. We have everything right here, so the focus should be clear.
Inspired by
He who tills his land will have plenty of bread, but he who follows worthless pursuits lacks sense.”
— Proverbs 12:11 (AMP)
This verse draws a perfect contrast between productive labour (tilling the land to grow food) and empty or unproductive pursuits. Building markets without first securing the goods to fill them is exactly the kind of “worthless pursuit” this proverb warns against. True economic security comes from production, not from rearranging trading spaces.
Thanks for reading. Sehabbat Shalom! Wishing you a peaceful and restful Shabbat.
