The 2026 Infrastructure Report Card marked funding as the weakest link in every single sector. The answer is not simply to borrow more. It is to finance differently, and the money Ghana needs may be closer to home than we think.
By Ing. Dr. Patrick Amoah Bekoe, F-GhIE | Vice President, Ghana Institution of Engineering, and Co-Chair, Public Accountability Committee
When the Ghana Institution of Engineering graded eight sectors of the country’s infrastructure this year, from roads and power to schools, clinics and railways, the headline was a sobering D3. But dig beneath the letter grade and one weakness appears in every sector without exception. Of the eight things the engineers measured, funding was the worst. Not a single sector, not even the strong performers in power and aviation, earned a good mark for how it is financed. If the report card is a health check on the nation’s infrastructure, the diagnosis is clear: the money is the sickest part of the system.
The numbers are stark. Road contractors were owed GH¢17.75 billion as of the end of 2024, a debt that has multiplied more than eleven times in a decade. Education needs an estimated two billion dollars it does not have. The water sector needs a couple of hundred million dollars a year. The power system needs about 1,200 megawatts of new capacity by 2028. Laid end to end, these gaps are far too large for the government’s annual budget to fill, especially after a debt restructuring and an IMF programme that have left the treasury with very little room to spare. So the honest question is not whether Ghana should build. It is how, and with whose money, it will pay to do so.
The old way has run out of road
For most of our history, public infrastructure has been paid for in one of two ways: from the government budget, or with loans, often from foreign lenders on concessional terms. Both taps are now running dry. We cannot tax our way out of a gap this size without crushing households and businesses, and we cannot borrow our way out without deepening a debt problem the country has only just begun to bring under control. The comfortable habit of waiting for the budget, or for the next big loan, is no longer a strategy. It is a queue that never moves.
The good news, and the report card is at pains to point this out, is that there is another way. Around the world, and increasingly across Africa, governments finance infrastructure from a much wider menu than the budget alone. Ghana has begun to sample from that menu. The task now is to eat properly.
Financing is not the same as funding
It helps to separate two ideas that we usually blur together. Financing is the money raised up front to build a road or a hospital. Funding is who ultimately pays it back over time. There are only ever three payers: the taxpayer, the person who uses the asset, or the person whose property or business gains value because it exists. Clever financing does not make money appear from nowhere. What it does is widen the pool of up-front capital, and, wherever fair, shift some of the repayment away from the hard-pressed general taxpayer and onto users and beneficiaries who can afford to contribute. Once you see infrastructure that way, the options open up.
The money may be closer than we think
Across Africa, pension funds and insurance companies were sitting on around 1.8 trillion dollars of long-term savings a few years ago, and they invested only about three cents of every dollar in infrastructure. The rest went into shares and government bills. Ghana has its own growing pool of pension savings, the retirement money of its own workers, much of it looking for exactly the kind of steady, long-term return that a toll road or a water plant can provide. Because this is local money, it comes in cedis, which sidesteps the exchange-rate risk that has wrecked so many foreign-financed projects. Channelling even a modest slice of our own pension savings into well-structured infrastructure funds could unlock more capital than any single foreign loan, and keep the returns at home.
Let those who benefit help pay
When government builds a new road, interchange or rail line, the land and businesses around it quietly become more valuable overnight. At present, that windfall goes entirely to whoever happens to own the plot. Cities from Hong Kong to Nairobi have learned to capture a fair share of that increase, through modest betterment charges or by developing land around new stations, and to plough it back into the very infrastructure that created the value. Ghana could do the same along its planned transport corridors. In the same spirit, where users can reasonably pay, through a toll, a tariff, a landing fee, a project can be built by a private partner who recovers the cost over time rather than asking the taxpayer to fund it all today.
Sharing the risk to bring private money in
Private investors are not charities, but they are not villains either. They will put money into Ghanaian infrastructure if the risks are fairly shared and the returns are predictable. This is the logic of two tools the report card highlights. Public-private partnerships let a company finance, build and run an asset, paid back through user charges or agreed government payments for good performance. Blended finance uses a small amount of public or donor money, often as a guarantee, to take the first hit if something goes wrong, which reassures far larger sums of private capital to follow. Ghana already has a vehicle built for exactly this, the Ghana Infrastructure Investment Fund, seeded with government equity to attract and manage private money across roads, health and housing. It should be scaled, not sidelined.
Our own people, and our own assets
Two further sources sit in plain sight. The first is the Ghanaian diaspora, millions of citizens abroad who send money home every month and who would often welcome the chance to invest in a named school, hospital or power project back home through a diaspora bond, patriotic capital that also happens to be patient. The second is what we already own. Mature, money-making assets, an operating airport, a power plant, a completed toll road, can be leased to specialist private operators, with the proceeds recycled into building the next generation of projects. Handled openly and with firm oversight, this turns yesterday’s investments into tomorrow’s, without a single new sovereign loan.
But first, trust
None of this works without one thing that money cannot buy: credibility. The same report card that measured the funding gap also explained why capital stays away. When a government lets contractor debts swell to GH¢17.75 billion, every prospective investor takes note that public promises may not be kept. No pension fund, no private partner, no diaspora saver will commit for twenty years to a partner who does not pay on time. So the first and cheapest act of innovative financing is not a bond or a fund. It is to honour our commitments, to pay what we owe, to prepare projects properly before we launch them, and to look after what we build. Restore that trust, and the capital will come. Squander it, and the cleverest financial instrument in the world will sit unused.
Ghana does not lack the money to fix its infrastructure. It lacks, for now, the structures and the discipline to attract it. The report card has done its job by naming the problem honestly. The next move belongs to the rest of us: to open the menu, to invite our own savers and our own diaspora to the table, and to become the kind of partner that serious capital is willing to trust. The roads, the schools and the clinics are waiting. So, it turns out, is the money.
Ing. Dr. Patrick Amoah Bekoe is a Fellow and Vice President of the Ghana Institution of Engineering and Co-Chair of its Public Accountability Committee. Figures are drawn from the 2026 Ghana Infrastructure Report Card.
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