Ghana’s informal sector, which employs the majority of the workforce and constitutes a significant portion of the economy, requires urgent attention from policymakers, experts have said.
Speaking on the Citi Breakfast Show on Friday, December 5, 2025, Dr. Owusu Boampong, Senior Research Fellow at the University of Cape Coast, highlighted the challenges in accurately capturing productivity in the sector.
“Many reports have established that about 92.3% of businesses in Ghana are informal, contributing around 27% of GDP. Productivity in that sector is also low. Yet, national productivity reports suggest productivity in the informal sector is as high as 80%. This discrepancy shows the difficulty in accounting for informal activity in the country,” Dr. Boampong explained.
He added, “Just imagine that 80% of Ghana’s economy is informal, yet for all these years, we have not been able to solve the problem. Where the majority of your people are, that is where you shift your attention to. It is high time we begin to pay attention to the informal economy.”
Josephine Dugbatey, a street vendor and Executive Member of the Informal Hawkers and Vendors Association of Ghana, said the concerns of traders are often overlooked during policy formulation and development implementation.
“The issue is not that we do not want to occupy the markets they build for us. The problem is that there is no adequate space within these markets. We are many as traders, and even if more people venture into trading, we end up cramped in the same small spaces. On top of that, sanitation is poor. We stay in the markets with our refuse, and the assemblies do not come around to collect them,” she lamented.
Supporting this view, an Associate Professor at the University of Ghana Business School (UGBS), Prof James Mensah, emphasised the absence of a unified, nationally binding policy targeting the informal sector.
“I have not heard, so far, about a unified policy that addresses the informal sector. The Ministry of Labour had initiatives at one point, but we do not know their status. Our advocacy is about bringing visibility to the informal sector; they must be heard. The law should recognise them, and they should be actively involved in law-making processes,” the academic said.
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