WHO ARE WE BECOMING AS A NATION?

There are questions a nation asks when it is celebrating, and there are questions it must ask when the celebration is over. For Ghana, one is becoming hard to avoid: who are we becoming?

We know who we were, the Ghana of independence, of Nkrumah and Pan-Africanism, of constitutional renewal and peaceful transfers of power. We also know the Ghana we like to describe: democratic, peaceful, hospitable, resilient. But there is a difference between the country we remember, the country we advertise, and the country our daily choices are producing. That difference deserves examination.

Ghana’s problem today is not that everything is going wrong. The IMF reported in July 2026 that real GDP grew by 6% in 2025, inflation had fallen sharply, and Ghana's risk of debt distress had returned to moderate, yet unfinished work remains in revenue mobilisation, public financial management, state-owned enterprises, and inclusive growth. We are neither a failed state nor a finished success story. We are a country in transition, and transition demands self-examination.

Beyond Independence

Nkrumah's generation fought for political independence, but independence was never meant to be merely a change of flag the deeper project was the transformation of African life. Sovereignty today is also about whether a country can produce, innovate, educate, protect its resources, and make decisions without mortgaging its future.

We have spent considerable energy asking who should govern Ghana. We should spend more asking what kind of Ghana that governance should produce, a question that moves us from personalities to institutions, and from consumption to productive capacity.

The Economy Has Left Us a Lesson

Ghanaians experienced the crisis through ordinary life, including the cedi's volatility, rising food prices, expensive credit. The recent stabilisation is relief, but relief should not become forgetfulness. National prosperity cannot be built indefinitely on borrowing and optimism that tomorrow will absorb today's obligations.

The difficult work now is to build an economy that produces more than it consumes, creates opportunity beyond government employment, and gives young people a credible economic stake in the country. That is where economics becomes a question of national character.

The Young Are Answering with Their Feet

A 2025 Afrobarometer survey found that 76% of Ghanaians aged 18–35 had secondary or post-secondary qualifications, yet 34% were looking for work; six in ten preferred to start their own businesses. Another study found 61% of Ghanaians had considered emigrating, rising to 78% among those with post-secondary education, citing work opportunities and economic hardship.

This is a problem of national imagination, not just employment. The young Ghanaian who wants to leave is often asking a practical question: where can my effort become a future? A country should not resent its young people for wanting a better life, it should ask why so many feel they must look elsewhere to find one.

Galamsey Is Not Only an Environmental Crisis

We are rich in gold and increasingly anxious about the condition of our water. In September 2026, NAIMOS launched “Operation Water Shield” to protect major river systems including the Birim, Ankobra, Tano, Bia, Pra, and Offin, warning that illegal mining threatens water security.

The deeper question is philosophical: what do we believe belongs to us? If a river belongs only to the generation living beside it, it can be exploited; if it belongs also to generations yet unborn, exploitation becomes a question of stewardship. Gold can generate income. A river generates life. We should be careful about confusing the two.

Corruption Is Slowly Becoming a Problem of Trust

Corruption is not only the politician who takes a payment, it is the citizen who offers it, the official who facilitates it, and the citizen who condemns it in an opponent while excusing it in an ally. Afrobarometer reported in 2025 that 74% of Ghanaians believed corruption had increased, and only 26% believed people could report it without fear of retaliation.

This is ultimately a trust problem. The real prize in fighting corruption is not simply recovering stolen money; it is restoring confidence in the republic.

Deepening Democratic Culture

The Fourth Republic has given us constitutional continuity and competitive elections. But democracy lives in what happens between elections, in Parliament, in newsrooms, in homes, and on social media, where legitimate disagreement too often becomes partisan suspicion.

Yet Afrobarometer found 68% of Ghanaians preferred accountability even if it slowed decision-making, and 85% wanted leaders to listen to voters. The public appetite for democracy has not disappeared; the challenge is practising it without turning every disagreement into division.

The party should seek power. The republic must preserve trust.

Information Is Now Part of the Peace Infrastructure

Misinformation once moved at the speed of rumour; today it moves at the speed of a smartphone. Afrobarometer found that 82% of Ghanaians wanted the media to investigate government mistakes, while only 26% trusted news from social media. Citizens need more than access to information they need the capacity to evaluate it. This new civic literacy may become one of the defining requirements of peace in a digital Ghana.

Education Must Produce More Than Credentials

A certificate can open a door; it cannot by itself create integrity. Technical competence can create wealth; it cannot by itself create responsible citizenship. The question should not simply be how many young Ghanaians are graduating, but what problems those graduates are capable of solving as builders of institutions and society, not only job seekers.

From Resilience to Institutional Responsibility

Ghana’s improvisational talent the trader who returns to market, the teacher who works around scarcity is real social capital. But a nation’s resilience should not become a substitute for institutional reform. A citizen should not need a personal connection to navigate a public institution, nor a business a political network to operate fairly. That talent should be directed toward building systems that work, not merely surviving systems that do not.

From Inheritance to Stewardship

There is a useful African principle beneath all of this: we are custodians before we are owners. The politician holds power in trust. The civil servant holds authority in trust. The teacher holds the next generation in trust. Every citizen, in some measure, holds Ghana in trust.

Development is no longer simply what we accumulate, it is what we leave capable of enduring. Peace is not merely the absence of violence but the presence of conditions that let people live, disagree, innovate, and raise families without fear. Trust, education, clean water, and institutional integrity are all forms of national capital and when neglected, the country becomes poorer even if the balance sheet looks better.

So, Who Are We Becoming?

Ghana contains several possible futures: the Ghana of resilience and the Ghana of institutional weakness; the Ghana of ambitious youth and the Ghana of polarisation; the Ghana that wants accountability and the Ghana that excuses wrongdoing when it serves its side. The national task is deciding which tendencies become our inheritance.

Not whether Ghana is good or bad, or whether one party is better than another. Those questions are too narrow. The deeper issue is whether Ghana is becoming more capable, more trustworthy, more humane, and more conscious of the future it is creating. That is the standard by which our generation should be judged.

Nkrumah's generation secured political independence. The generations after built and defended the Fourth Republic. Ours is to deepen that inheritance, so that political stability becomes institutional strength, economic recovery becomes productive transformation, and peace becomes more than the absence of war.

We are already answering in our budgets, our rivers, our schools, our politics, in what we forward on our phones, in what we tolerate and what we refuse. We did not choose the Ghana we inherited. But we are choosing the Ghana we are leaving behind.

Who are we becoming as a nation?

The answer is not somewhere in the future. It is being written by us now.

Ideas build people. People build nations.

Communicating Amid Contagion: Appraising a Faith-Based Health Provider’s Response to the 2014–2015 Ebola Virus Disease Outbreak in Ghana

ABSTRACT

The 2014–2015 Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) outbreak in West Africa exposed the extent to which health system resilience depends on effective crisis and risk communication. While considerable scholarship has examined national and international response mechanisms, comparatively little attention has been paid to how faith-based health providers, which deliver an estimated 30–35% of health services in Ghana, organised their own communication response. This article draws on a mixed-methods study of the National Catholic Health Service (NCHS), Ghana’s largest faith-based health network, to appraise the communication strategies it deployed during the outbreak period. Using survey data from 100 health workers across two NCHS facilities and interviews with programme officers, the study finds that although the NCHS lacked a documented outbreak communication plan, it achieved wide message reach through Social Mobilisation and Information Education Communication (IEC) approaches anchored in staff durbars, congregational networks, and social media. Yet 56% of respondents identified persistent gaps, particularly around fear management and message translation. The article argues that faith-based providers require dedicated, pre-negotiated risk communication protocols integrated with national frameworks, rather than improvised adaptation during crisis, and proposes this integration as a concrete policy contribution to Ghana’s outbreak preparedness architecture.

Keywords: Ebola Virus Disease; health communication; faith-based health providers; crisis and risk communication; social mobilisation; Ghana

INTRODUCTION

When the Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) outbreak swept through Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone between 2014 and 2015, it infected more than 28,000 people and killed over 11,000, exposing profound weaknesses in West African health systems (World Health Organization [WHO], 2018). Ghana recorded no confirmed case, yet its proximity, porous borders and high population mobility placed it on continuous alert (Ghana Health Service, 2015). Government and donor attention concentrated on the Ghana Health Service’s (GHS) national preparedness architecture (Ghana Ebola National Plan, 2014), while assessments of WHO-led coordination proliferated internationally (Delamou et al., 2017). What received little scholarly attention was how Ghana’s substantial network of faith-based providers organised its own outbreak communication. The National Catholic Health Service (NCHS), which operates 38 hospitals, 81 clinics and 10 nursing colleges, and delivers roughly a third of Ghana’s health output through the Christian Health Association of Ghana (Adjei, 2011) represents an important but understudied case.

This article appraises the communication strategies the NCHS deployed during the 2014-2015 outbreak, addressing a specific gap in the health communication literature on faith-based crisis response, and offers a framework for how such providers might be integrated into national outbreak communication planning going forward. The question is not merely academic: with faith-based networks delivering close to a third of Ghana’s health output, their communication readiness or lack of it has direct bearing on how quickly and completely public health messaging reaches the communities such providers serve.

THEORETICAL CONTEXT

Effective outbreak communication is widely recognised as central to containment, yet studies consistently show that formal plans alone do not guarantee preparedness (Dickmann et al., 2016). This study is grounded in three complementary frameworks. The Health Belief Model (Rosenstock, 1974) explains why individuals adopt protective behaviour based on perceived susceptibility and severity — relevant given the acute uncertainty Ghanaians expressed despite the absence of confirmed cases (Adongo et al., 2016). Diffusion of Innovation theory explains how new health behaviours spread through population subgroups over time, and Communication for Behavioural Impact (COMBI), a structured social mobilisation methodology built around leveraging existing community and institutional networks rather than constructing new ones provided the practical scaffolding most closely mirrored in the NCHS’s own approach (WHO, 2012). Taken together, these frameworks suggest that faith-based providers, with their dense pre-existing congregational and staff networks, are theoretically well positioned for rapid social mobilisation, but not necessarily for the sustained reassurance that risk communication also demands (Schiavo, 2014).

METHODOLOGY

The study used a concurrent mixed-methods design (Creswell & Clark, 2007), combining a 100-respondent structured survey across two NCHS facilities: St. Luke Catholic Hospital, Apam, and St. Gregory Catholic Hospital, Gomoa-Budumburam with semi-structured interviews of two NCHS Directorate Health officers. Facilities were purposively selected from among those identified as high-risk under the NCHS’s Canadian High Commission-funded preparedness training. Respondents were predominantly female (79%) and drawn from nursing (65%), with 95% holding tertiary qualifications, a workforce well positioned to interpret technical health messaging. Quantitative data were analysed descriptively; qualitative interview data were coded thematically against three domains including strategy, effectiveness, and gaps matching the study’s three research objectives.

FINDINGS

Two strategies dominated the NCHS response. Information Education Communication (IEC) relied heavily on social media: 67% of respondents cited WhatsApp as an information source, alongside health outreach and flyers (each reported at 30%), interpersonal communication (27%), and public announcements (14%). Social Mobilisation activity centred on staff durbars, confirmed by 63% of respondents, followed by church and mosque engagement (41%), school sensitisation (21%), community durbars (18%), and outreach to market women and driver unions (12% and 8% respectively). This pattern reflects a provider that mobilised its existing institutional and congregational networks rather than building outbreak-specific channels from scratch consistent with COMBI’s emphasis on working through existing social infrastructure (WHO, 2012).

On effectiveness, respondents were broadly positive: 88% rated NCHS messaging as either extensive (45%) or very extensive (43%), with only 12% describing it as merely somewhat extensive. Interview data corroborated this: NCHS officers described using internal monitoring tools to verify sensitisation activity across facilities.

Yet 56% of respondents identified gaps, and the qualitative data clarify why. First, fear operated as a double-edged driver: it motivated engagement with sensitisation content but simultaneously undermined the reassurance that messaging was meant to provide, leaving staff and community members uncertain of their safety despite high message exposure. Second, respondents flagged the adequacy of local-language translation as a persistent weakness, echoing a broader tension in Ghana’s wider outbreak response: high awareness does not equate to full comprehension (Adongo et al., 2016). Third, and most significant for policy, neither survey respondents nor interviewees could point to a documented, NCHS-specific health emergency communication plan; the response instead relied on GHS protocols and improvised adaptation of existing institutional communication habits.

DISCUSSION

These findings extend the outbreak communication literature in two ways. First, they demonstrate that faith-based providers can achieve high message reach through pre-existing social capital congregational networks, staff durbars, community trust without a formal outbreak communication plan, partially validating COMBI’s premise that social mobilisation succeeds by working through existing structures rather than building parallel ones (WHO, 2012). Second, and more critically, the findings expose the limits of that approach: reach is not the same as reassurance. The persistence of fear and uncertainty despite extensive messaging suggests that faith-based providers need risk communication training specifically oriented toward psychological reassurance and rumour management, not simply message dissemination (Böl, 2015). This matters beyond Ghana: CHAG-affiliated and comparable faith-based networks across sub-Saharan Africa deliver a substantial share of frontline care in exactly the rural and peri-urban settings where outbreak risk communication is hardest to execute through government channels alone (Boateng, 2017). A network capable of assembling a durbar within days, or reaching congregants through an existing Sunday gathering, is also a network that public health authorities have historically under-resourced and under-consulted in formal emergency planning, a mismatch this study’s findings make difficult to ignore.

CONCLUSION AND CONTRIBUTION

The NCHS’s Ebola-period communication response was resourceful but reactive. Its reliance on Social Mobilisation and IEC materials achieved wide reach, yet the absence of a documented emergency communication protocol, and unresolved gaps around fear and translation, point to a structural vulnerability likely shared by many faith-based providers operating in similar contexts. The principal contribution of this study is empirical and specific: it is among the first appraisals of a faith-based provider’s outbreak communication strategy in Ghana, rather than of government or WHO-led coordination, and it demonstrates that institutional trust and network density are necessary but insufficient substitutes for a documented risk communication plan. Accordingly, this study recommends that national outbreak preparedness frameworks formally integrate faith-based networks such as CHAG and NCHS into pre-negotiated risk communication protocols, complete with translated message banks and fear-management guidance, rather than treating their contribution as an informal auxiliary to be assessed only after the fact. Doing so would convert an improvised strength into a planned, institutional capability ahead of the next health emergency, and would extend the reach of national risk communication into precisely the congregational and community networks that formal government channels most often struggle to penetrate.

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