Ghana is about to spend an enormous sum of public money to construct a new expressway.
The government has ring-fenced US$1.7 billion at the Bank of Ghana for a new, roughly 199-kilometre, six-lane Accra-Kumasi Expressway with interchanges, meant to complement, not replace, the existing highway.
This is the most consequential road safety decision Ghana will make in this decade. The Minister of Roads and Highways must get it right, because the old corridor shows us, in blood, what happens when we get it wrong.
The numbers demand urgency. Nationally, road crashes killed 2,673 people between January and November 2025 alone, an 18.5 per cent rise on the previous year, with speeding, drink-driving, unlicensed driving and unregistered vehicles cited by the National Road Safety Authority (NRSA) as the leading causes. January 2026 alone recorded 383 fatalities, up from 261 in January 2025.
Over a full reporting year, more than 14,700 crashes involving nearly 25,000 vehicles produced almost 2,950 deaths, with males accounting for roughly four in five fatalities and the Ashanti, Eastern and Greater Accra regions, precisely the corridor in question, bearing the heaviest toll.
On the existing Accra-Kumasi Highway itself, 2026 has already delivered a grim procession. A fatal Suhum crash caused by wrongful overtaking in April, a fuel tanker fireball near Nsawam in February, and a deadly truck-minibus collision near Paradise Restaurant in August, among many others.
The pattern behind these tragedies cannot be placed only at the doorstep of reckless driving. It is also structural. Eastern Regional NRSA officials have pointed out, bluntly, that a highway begun as a dualisation project under one government was left unfinished by successive administrations, forcing traffic onto single lanes where overtaking means entering the path of oncoming vehicles. Add to that a highway that, over the years, sprouted market stalls, fuel stations, unauthorised junctions and roadside settlements pressing right up against the carriageway, and you have engineered conflict points into a road never designed to carry them. A new expressway that repeats this pattern, however wide its lanes, will simply relocate the carnage.
Design the road so drivers cannot make fatal choices.
International practice, and simple physics, point to what must be non-negotiable in the new expressway’s design.
First, full access control: no direct entry from adjoining land onto the expressway. Every community, farm and business along the corridor must reach it through grade-separated interchanges at planned intervals, never through informal cuts in the median or shoulder.
Second, a continuous physical median barrier separating opposing carriageways, which alone removes the head-on collisions that have defined the old road’s death toll.
Third, paved shoulders, rumble strips at the edge line and centre line, and reflective delineators that work in heavy rain and dust.
Fourth, dedicated service roads running parallel to the expressway in populated stretches, so slow-moving traffic, motorcycles, pedestrians, and livestock never share tarmac with vehicles doing 100 kilometres per hour.
Fifth, truck lay-bys, weigh stations and rest areas at engineered intervals since fatigue and overloaded haulage trucks are recurring factors in fatal collisions on this route.
Finally, street lighting and CCTV-linked speed enforcement at high-risk nodes, backed by emergency response bays so ambulances can reach crash scenes within Ghana’s target response window.
Stop the settlements before they start.
Ghana’s greatest planning failure has not been engineering; it has been land governance. Unless government acts now, hawkers, fuel stations, chop bars, and unplanned housing will again creep toward the new expressway’s edges within a few years, exactly as happened on the N1, the Tema Motorway and the current Accra-Kumasi Road. To prevent this, a few things must happen before a single vehicle uses the new road.
One, a legally protected right-of-way buffer, ideally 50 metres on each side, must be gazetted and fenced, not merely marked on a map. Two, the Ghana Highway Authority, Lands Commission and the district assemblies along the corridor must sign a binding joint enforcement protocol, with satellite and drone monitoring to flag encroachment within weeks, not years, of it starting.
Three, government must proactively plan and build authorised commercial nodes, fuel stations, markets, lorry parks at the interchange points themselves, giving traders and transport operators a legitimate, safe place to do business instead of leaving them to colonise the shoulder out of necessity. Four, resettlement and compensation for communities displaced by the new alignment must be completed transparently and on schedule, because unresolved land disputes are precisely what causes desperate, unplanned re-occupation of road reserves later.
In conclusion, institutionalise road safety, don’t just build it.
Design alone will not deliver zero crashes. The Ministry of Roads and Highways should commission independent road safety audits at the design, pre-opening, and post-opening stages, as is standard on expressways in Kenya, Ethiopia, and India. The NRSA and Ghana Highway Authority should install a real-time crash data and traffic monitoring system on the corridor from day one, publishing quarterly figures so problems are caught early rather than discovered after a mass-casualty crash makes headlines. Speed limits must be enforced by camera, not by hope, and heavy-goods vehicles should be geo-fenced and monitored for compliance with axle load and rest-time rules.
Mr Minister, the money has been found, and the political will appears real. What Ghana must not do is build another wide, fast road and leave its edges to fate. Zero crashes on the Accra-Kumasi Expressway will not come from concrete and asphalt alone, it will come from access control, enforced land governance, and institutions that treat road safety as an engineering discipline, not an afterthought. Road Lines Foundation stands ready to support the Ministry with road safety reviews and public education as this project proceeds.
By Mr Osei Kufuor, Executive Director, Road Lines Foundation
The writer is a Road Safety and Mobility expert, Executive Director for Road Lines Foundation, former Programme Lead for Bloomberg Philanthropies Initiative for Global Road Safety, and an alumnus of the Global Road Safety Leadership Course from Johns Hopkins University and Global Road Safety Partnership.
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DISCLAIMER: The Views, Comments, Opinions, Contributions and Statements made by Readers and Contributors on this platform do not necessarily represent the views or policy of Multimedia Group Limited.
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