For decades, Ghana has been developing policies and institutions that have attracted the attention of other countries across Africa.
Governments have sent officials to Ghana to study its national health insurance system, social-protection programmes, school-feeding arrangements, digital-payment infrastructure, mining administration and public-sector reforms.
Yet there is an interesting paradox.
While Ghana has increasingly become a destination for policy learning, the country has often struggled to translate some of its own innovations into sustained improvements in productivity, efficiency, value addition and public-service delivery.
The question is not simply whether Ghana has good policies. It is whether Ghana has been able to institutionalise, finance, implement and continuously improve the policies it develops.
The NHIS: An African policy reference point
One of Ghana’s earliest and most prominent policy innovations to attract international attention was the National Health Insurance Scheme.
Established in 2003, the NHIS represented Ghana’s attempt to move away from the country’s previous cash-and-carry system and provide a more structured mechanism for financing healthcare.
The model attracted considerable attention from other African countries.
Tanzania, Liberia, Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda, Malawi and several other countries have sent officials to Ghana to study aspects of the country’s health-insurance system.
The National Health Insurance Authority’s 2018 annual report, for example, recorded a study tour involving 60 delegates from 14 countries, including Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, Malawi, Burkina Faso, Mali, Madagascar, Niger and Côte d’Ivoire.
Tanzanian officials have specifically studied Ghana’s experience in areas including registration, claims processing, provider accreditation and administration.
Liberia has also examined Ghana’s experience as it developed its own health-insurance arrangements.
Ghana’s experience has therefore become part of the wider African search for mechanisms to expand access to healthcare.
But the country that pioneered the scheme continues to face questions about financing, coverage, claims management and sustainability.
Ghana’s 2025 budget documentation reported 18.4 million active NHIS members in 2024, representing 56.3% of the population.
A health-insurance system that has attracted international study has itself struggled to translate extensive policy coverage into comprehensive and financially sustainable universal health coverage.
Social protection. LEAP
Ghana’s experience with social protection provides another example of how policy learning moves across borders.
The Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty programme, or LEAP, was introduced as part of Ghana’s efforts to provide cash support to vulnerable households.
But Ghana itself was a learner.
The development of LEAP was influenced by Brazil’s Bolsa Família, and Brazilian officials participated in Ghana’s policy-learning process.
Ghana subsequently became a source of lessons for other African countries.
Delegations from Malawi have visited Ghana to study the country’s social-protection system.
The Gambia has also examined Ghana’s Single Registry and other mechanisms used to identify and support vulnerable populations.
The story demonstrates that policy innovation does not necessarily move in one direction.
Countries learn from one another, adapt policies to their own circumstances and sometimes become sources of knowledge for others.
The challenge for Ghana is whether it can continue improving the systems that other countries are studying.
School feeding: Ghana’s model travels to Nigeria
Another important stage in Ghana’s policy journey was the development of the Ghana School Feeding Programme.
The programme attracted interest beyond Ghana because it attempted to combine social protection with local agricultural production.
Instead of treating school meals simply as welfare expenditure, the model created opportunities for local farmers and food suppliers to participate in the programme.
In 2013, officials from Nigeria’s Osun State travelled to Ghana to study the country’s school-feeding programme before developing and expanding the state’s own O’MEALS initiative.
The Nigerian experience demonstrates how Ghanaian policy ideas have travelled beyond the country’s borders.
But once again, Ghana continues to confront challenges surrounding the financing, quality, coverage and sustainability of its own programme.
The question is therefore not whether Ghana’s school-feeding model was useful.
The question is why a model sufficiently attractive for another government to study continues to face structural implementation challenges in Ghana itself.
The oil-palm paradox: How Malaysia built an industry around a West African crop
The next case is different.
Malaysia did not come to only Ghana to learn how to produce palm oil, and there is no evidence that Malaysia copied Ghana’s oil-palm policy. However, history identifies that part of their palm industry materials were sourced from Ghana.
Oil palm is indigenous to West Africa.
Yet after the crop was introduced into Southeast Asia during the colonial period, Malaysia developed one of the world’s most productive and sophisticated palm-oil industries.
Ghana remains an important producer of oil palm but has not achieved comparable levels of productivity and industrial integration.
Ghana’s Feed Ghana programme estimates smallholder yields at approximately six tonnes per hectare, compared with about 15 to 18 tonnes per hectare on large-scale Ghanaian plantations and up to approximately 24 tonnes per hectare in Malaysia.
The difference extends beyond farm yields.
Malaysia developed an extensive industrial ecosystem connecting research and improved planting material to plantations to processing to refining to oleochemicals to food products to cosmetics to industrial products and to exports.
Ghana has struggled to develop a comparable downstream industry.
Research on Ghana’s oil-palm sector identifies challenges including fragmented smallholder production, low productivity, weak infrastructure, land-tenure problems, poor marketing systems and limited value-chain integration.
The Malaysian story therefore raises a fundamental question about Ghana’s broader development strategy on why has Ghana struggled to capture more value from a crop that originated in its own region while Malaysia transformed it into a globally competitive industrial sector?
The answer may lie not in the availability of resources, but in the institutions and systems built around those resources.
Digital payments: Ghana becomes a regional reference point
The next phase of Ghana’s policy innovation emerged in the digital economy.
Ghana has developed an increasingly sophisticated digital-payment infrastructure through institutions such as Ghana Interbank Payment and Settlement Systems, or GhIPSS.
The country’s Mobile Money Interoperability system allows customers using different networks to transact across platforms.
That infrastructure has attracted attention from other countries.
In 2025, a delegation from Kenya’s central bank travelled to Ghana to study the country’s payment systems, including mobile-money interoperability, instant payments, GhanaPay and GhanaQR.
Officials from Tanzania, Sierra Leone and the Bank of Central African States have also engaged Ghanaian institutions on payment-system development.
Kenya is one of Africa’s most developed digital-finance markets and performs strongly on several indicators of financial inclusion.
World Bank data for 2024 show account ownership at 87% among Kenyan women and 94% among Kenyan men, compared with 78% and 84% respectively in Ghana.
This demonstrates that possessing an innovative institutional architecture does not automatically guarantee superior outcomes.
Digital government: From policy innovation to public-sector transformation
Ghana’s growing digitalisation has also attracted attention from other African governments.
Nigeria has sent officials to Ghana to examine aspects of the country’s digital transformation and digital-economy initiatives.
Malawi has also undertaken a study tour of Ghana’s digital-transformation initiatives, examining areas including digital identity, cybersecurity, e-government, digital infrastructure, digital skills and public-sector innovation.
The interest suggests that Ghana is increasingly being viewed as a source of practical experience in building digital public infrastructure.
But, as with other sectors, the real measure of success will not be the number of delegations that visit Ghana.
It will be whether Ghana can use the same digital infrastructure to deliver faster, cheaper and more reliable public services.
State-owned enterprises: Liberia looks to Ghana
Ghana’s attempt to reform the governance of state-owned enterprises has also become a reference point.
The establishment of the State Interests and Governance Authority, or SIGA, was intended to strengthen oversight, accountability and performance management among state-owned enterprises.
Liberia subsequently sent a delegation to Ghana to study SIGA’s framework.
The Liberian delegation examined areas including SOE oversight, performance monitoring, compliance, digitalisation and governance.
For Ghana, however, the challenge remains whether institutional oversight can consistently translate into profitable, efficient and accountable state-owned enterprises.
Once again, the issue is not necessarily the absence of a policy framework.
It is whether the framework can produce the intended results.
Land administration: Another Ghanaian system attracts regional interest
Ghana’s land-administration reforms have also attracted international attention.
An Intergovernmental Authority on Development, or IGAD, delegation visited Ghana to study aspects of the country’s land-administration system.
The delegation examined Ghana’s Land Act 2020, digitalisation of land records, decentralisation and systems for managing land revenues.
The interest illustrates another feature of Ghana’s development experience.
The country increasingly possesses institutional innovations that other African countries regard as potentially useful.
But Ghana’s land sector continues to face problems involving land disputes, registration delays, overlapping interests and administrative bottlenecks.
The lesson is becoming increasingly familiar.
Creating an institution is one thing. Making that institution consistently deliver is another.
And now, GoldBod
The latest chapter in Ghana’s growing reputation as a source of policy lessons is the country’s gold sector.
The establishment of the Ghana Gold Board, popularly known as GoldBod, has attracted interest from several African countries seeking to understand Ghana’s attempt to reorganise the domestic gold market.
According to GoldBod, delegations from Sierra Leone, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Sudan and Namibia have engaged Ghanaian institutions to learn about aspects of Ghana’s gold-governance framework.
Their interests include gold purchasing, licensing, certification, artisanal and small-scale mining formalisation, regulation and mineral-value retention.
The interest is significant.
Ghana is Africa’s leading gold producer and has been attempting to restructure the domestic gold market while strengthening state oversight and increasing the value retained from the country’s gold resources.
But GoldBod also provides the clearest warning against drawing conclusions too quickly.
The institution is still relatively new.
It is therefore too early to determine whether the countries studying Ghana’s model will eventually achieve better outcomes, or whether Ghana will succeed in transforming its gold resources into greater domestic value.
For now, what can be established is that other countries see enough value in Ghana’s approach to come and study it.
The real test will come later.
The Ghana paradox
Across these cases, a pattern begins to emerge.
Ghana has demonstrated an ability to develop policies and institutions that attract international attention.
Other countries have come to Ghana to study several policies including health insurance, social protection, school feeding, digital payments, digital government, mining administration, land administration, state-owned enterprise governance and gold regulation.
But Ghana itself continues to struggle with many of the same problems its policies were designed to solve.
This does not necessarily mean the policies have failed.
Nor does a foreign study tour prove that Ghana’s model is superior.
Rather, the evidence points to a deeper development challenge.
Ghana may have an implementation and institutionalisation problem rather than an ideas problem.
A policy can be innovative. A law can be progressive. An institution can be well designed but sustainable development requires more.
It requires financing, institutional continuity, competent implementation, reliable data, accountability, technological adaptation and long-term investment.
The experience of Malaysia’s palm-oil industry demonstrates the importance of another factor: value addition.
Producing a commodity is not the same as building an industry around it and establishing a policy is not the same as building an institution capable of continuously improving it.
Perhaps the most important question for Ghana is therefore not “Why do other countries come to learn from us?”. We should avert our minds rather to “Why are we sometimes unable to achieve at home what others believe is worth learning from us?”
By Ishmael Oduro-Acheampong
