A Bold Vision: Paving the Way for Sustainable Growth
Ghana’s ambitious move toward a 24-hour economy marks a defining national moment. Encapsulated in the 24H+ Programme, this transformation promises unprecedented productivity, vast new opportunities, and heightened global competitiveness. However, if this vision is to succeed, its vital human and operational dimensions—health, safety, and societal well-being—must be treated as indispensable pillars.
The Hidden Strain: A Workforce Pushed to Its Limits
Behind every factory, logistics hub, or commercial district operating around the clock, there’s a workforce facing unique physiological stressors. Shift work, disrupted circadian rhythms, and extended work cycles are not merely operational adjustments—they are physiological stressors. Fatigue, if unmanaged, is the leading precursor to industrial accidents and mental health degradation. The 24-hour cycle demands that we rethink the biological limits of our human capital.
Safety as a Non-Negotiable Pillar
To succeed, the 24H+ Programme must treat safety not as a cost center, but as a strategic asset. Night-time operations carry unique risks, including lower visibility and slower emergency response times. Organizations must invest in superior lighting, fatigue-management systems, and robust onsite emergency protocols that function as effectively at 3:00 AM as they do at 3:00 PM.
Conclusion: A Call to Action for Ghanaian Industry
As we embrace this bold economic shift, our priority must remain our people. By integrating Health, Safety, and Environment (HSE) into the very architecture of the 24-hour economy, Ghana can build a truly resilient, productive, and globally respected industrial future.
Ghana faces a dual challenge: escalating climate change impacts and severe post-harvest losses. For millions of smallholder farmers, climate change isn’t an abstract concept but a daily struggle. Addressing these intertwined risks requires a holistic approach, from innovative financing to advanced storage solutions.
The Double Whammy: Climate Shocks and Post-Harvest Losses
Rising temperatures and unpredictable rainfall—leading to both drought and destructive floods—are increasingly common. Northern regions push agricultural systems to their breaking point. Equally devastating is post-harvest spoilage, where up to 40-50% of perishables rot due to lack of cooling and poor infrastructure. This cycle traps producers in poverty and undermines national security.
Solutions Across the Value Chain
We must build resilience across the entire value chain using Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA), solar-powered cold storage, and blended finance instruments like Parametric Insurance. Parametric insurance is a critical tool that ensures rapid liquidity after climate disasters, allowing farmers to recover and reinvest quickly without lengthy claims processes. EnviroSAFE is at the forefront of designing these technical financial mechanisms to protect West African food security.
After every major market fire in Ghana, the response follows a familiar script. Officials tour the damage. Committees are formed. Directives are issued. Within months, the markets are rebuilt or re-occupied with the same congested layouts, illegal connections, combustible construction, choked access roads, and neglected hydrants. In the last twenty four months alone, fires have torn through Kantamanto, Madina, Makola, Kejetia, Agbogbloshie, Anloga, Ashaiman, Kumasi Magazine, Kwame Nkrumah Circle, and Tudu. Ghana’s markets do not burn by accident. They burn by design: systems never built to make safety consequential, maintained by institutions never held accountable for the consequences. These are not isolated tragedies. They are a pattern Ghana has the knowledge and the means to break. What it has lacked is the will.
The causes are well understood, even if rarely confronted honestly. Ghana’s markets did not grow according to plan. They expanded organically, were formalised in place, and are now structurally hazardous: no fire breaks, no emergency access routes, stalls built on top of one another in ways no fire safety framework would sanction. Illegal occupation has compounded the problem, creating overcrowding that overloads electrical circuits and blocks emergency access. Resolving it requires relocation, and relocation carries political cost. That cost has consistently been chosen over the human cost of the fires overcrowding makes inevitable.
Combustible construction is a parallel failure. Markets built predominantly from wood and makeshift materials do not merely fail to contain fire; they accelerate it. A trader in a wooden stall is not making a lifestyle choice. In most cases it is the only structure available, in an environment where no authority has ever required anything different.
Beneath all of this lies a single structural absence: fire safety has never been a condition of market occupancy. Traders obtain allocations, pay levies, and renew permits without ever demonstrating safety compliance. There is no point in the relationship between trader and authority where safety is consequential. That absence is not accidental. It reflects a system built around revenue collection, not risk management.
When fire broke out at Tudu on the evening of June 3rd 2026, a Ghana National Fire Service officer captured the reality in a sentence: there is only one fire hydrant here. Electrical fault is suspected. One firefighter was injured and others suffered electrical shocks trying to contain the blaze. Ghana does not lack legal frameworks. The National Fire Service Act, building codes, and market bylaws all exist. Enforcement breaks down precisely where it would carry a cost, fiscally, operationally, or politically. Authorities collect levies from traders while accountability lags behind, opening a gap between who benefits from markets and who answers for their safety. The result is a system in which responsibility is diffuse, accountability deferred, and the consequences borne entirely by those least able to absorb them.
The scale demands honesty. When Kantamanto burned in 2025, roughly 7,000 shops were destroyed and over 30,000 traders lost their livelihoods in a single night. That alone should have forced structural reform. Instead the script played out, and within months Madina burned. Then Makola. Then Kejetia. Then Tudu.
Treating each blaze as an isolated incident requiring a technical fix has failed. What is needed is a coordinated attack on the conditions that make these markets combustible, beginning with the built environment. Metropolitan authorities must develop and enforce market master plans defining legal occupation, regulating density, and guaranteeing access routes for emergency vehicles. Relocation of illegally occupied spaces must be planned, compensated, and phased, not the political confrontation it has become. The political cost is real, but far smaller than the cost of the next fire.
Building standards matter just as much. Minimum fire-resistant construction standards must be set for market environments and tied directly to stall allocation and renewal. No trader should be able to renew a stall in a structure that would actively spread the fire that destroys their livelihood.
Electrical safety demands the same seriousness. The overloaded connections common in Ghana’s markets are not accidents waiting to happen; they are accidents in slow motion. Periodic inspection by certified electricians should be a condition of market operating permits, with disconnection powers for violations and no renewal without a valid safety certificate.
One reform underpins all the others: fire safety compliance must become a non-negotiable condition of market occupancy. Make safety consequential at the point of allocation and renewal, and the entire incentive structure changes. Fire safety becomes an operational requirement rather than a moral appeal.
The path forward is specific. Metropolitan Assemblies must make fire safety compliance a condition of stall allocation and permit renewal, starting next cycle: no certificate, no renewal. This is not a new power but an unused one. Assemblies that collect levies from traders have both the authority and the obligation to keep them safe, and that obligation must now be made enforceable.
The national government must require every metropolitan assembly to develop and gazette a market master plan within a defined timeframe, including fire-resistant construction standards, emergency access corridors, and enforced density limits. Building codes exist in Ghana; the missing step is their consistent application to informal markets, and only a national mandate will compel uniform action.
NADMO must extend its market safety assessments and seasonal campaigns, particularly Operation Stop Fire Disasters, to all major markets, and publish its findings to the relevant assemblies. NADMO cannot compel assemblies to act on planning failures, but it can make inaction visible, a significant and underused power.
The insurance industry’s role is a sequenced one. Markets without basic fire safety, enforceable building standards, and regulated density cannot be insured at premiums informal traders can absorb. As prevention takes hold and risk falls, insurers must be ready with microinsurance calibrated to small-scale incomes. The commercial opportunity and the social need will both be there; the industry must meet that moment rather than let it pass.
The most recent fire will not be the last if these interventions go unimplemented. Somewhere in Ghana, another market is already accumulating the conditions for the next inferno: illegal connections, combustible structures, choked access, and no requirement that forces anyone to notice. The question for Ghana’s metropolitan authorities, national government, disaster management institutions, and insurers is simple. How many more markets, and how many more livelihoods, before the cost of action falls below the cost of inaction?
Yaw Banahene is the Managing Partner and Lead Risk Management Consultant at EnviroSAFE Ghana Limited, a firm specialising in environmental risk, occupational health and safety, and industrial and public safety consulting. He has worked extensively across Ghana’s agricultural, hospitality, industrial, and informal commercial sectors, advising on risk reduction frameworks and regulatory compliance. He writes in his professional capacity on the intersection of governance, risk management, and economic resilience.
