By Felix Larry ESSILFIE (PhD)
Ghana’s policy debate has converged on the proposition that extending economic activity beyond daylight hours could unlock a fresh growth impulse anchored in the small- and medium-enterprise (SME) segment.
A 24-hour economy is not merely a slogan but an operational shift that re-prices time itself, enabling firms to sweat fixed assets more intensively while deepening labour–capital complementarities.
The idea resonates with post-Romer endogenous-growth arguments in which higher utilisation rates enlarge the effective capital stock and accelerate knowledge diffusion through “learning in motion.” Empirical macro-simulation undertaken for this article indicates that if ≈33 % of formal SMEs adopt dual shifts and average capacity utilisation rises from 56 % to 72 %, Ghana’s real gross domestic product could expand from US $78 billion in 2024 to about US $89 billion by 2028—an incremental 14 % over the baseline.
Under the same assumptions, the SME value-added share of output would climb from 40 % to 50 %, non-traditional export earnings could rise by US $1.5 billion, and domestic tax receipts would improve by ≈GH₵18 billion as value-added tax, pay-as-you-earn and corporate-income flows reinforce each other.
These pay-offs are regionally significant: an employment gain of 1 million jobs would represent ≈33 % of net labour-force additions expected over the next 4 years, easing the demographic pressure that has kept under-employment stubbornly above 9 %.
Macro potential is only realised when micro-foundations are sound. A granular constraint scan of 6,500 SMEs, corroborated by recent field surveys, shows that overnight service-availability indices remain fragile. System Average Interruption Duration (SAIDI) in the Accra and Tema distribution zones stands at ≈42 minutes per customer per month—almost triple the reliability benchmark required for efficient night production.
The SME credit gap is ≈7 % of GDP, and working-capital cycles that double when inventories must be carried through a second shift collide with short loan tenors averaging 18 months. Only 18 % of existing labour contracts explicitly accommodate night work, and digital payments—crucial for low-value, high-velocity evening transactions—penetrate merely 37 % of registered SMEs. Private security costs absorb 6–7 % of turnover, diluting the productivity dividend that longer operating hours could otherwise confer.
Sectoral heterogeneity complicates the landscape. Logistics and cold-chain providers already display strong after-dusk demand and decent workforce flexibility; their composite readiness score, on a 5-point scale that weights energy dependence, labour flexibility and after-hours demand, is 4.0. Hospitality, tourism and ICT-enabled business-process outsourcing match that preparedness. By contrast, light manufacturing and agro-processing endure heavier energy intensity and legacy labour practices that push their readiness nearer 3.3. The policy implication is clear: a phased approach must prioritise sectors with high marginal returns to extended hours while using targeted incentives to lift laggards toward threshold readiness.
Fiscal instruments provide the first lever. A time-of-use energy rebate cutting off-peak tariffs by 25 %—sun-setting after 5 years and capped at 0.35 % of GDP—can re-price the night shift without unduly straining public finances; incremental VAT and PAYE collections from the additional output, conservatively modelled at 0.4 % of GDP, should offset the gross cost. Complementary shift-apprenticeship tax credits, allowing firms to deduct double the certified training wage up to GH₵25,000 annually, align with human-capital externalities while cushioning wage differentials that could provoke cost-push inflation.
On the monetary side, the Bank of Ghana can ring-fence liquidity for qualifying firms through a targeted refinance window—labelled “SME-24”—priced 10 percentage points below the standing policy rate of 29.5 %. Sterilisation via short-tenor BoG bills would neutralise excess-reserve creation. Blended-finance solutions must follow rapidly: the Venture Capital Trust Fund is already preparing an instrument to crowd in private capital for night-economy ventures, ensuring leverage of at least 1 public cedi to 3 private cedis.
Even with concessional liquidity, creditors will require downside protection because the novelty of a 24-hour model generates asymmetric information about borrower viability. Partial-risk guarantees that cover 50 % of default exposure can de-risk lender balance sheets while exploiting the long-duration pools held by domestic pension funds and multilateral development banks. International experience shows that guarantee leverage of 4–5 times the public stake is achievable where regulatory clarity and transparent claim procedures are established ex ante. The Securities and Exchange Commission and National Pensions Regulatory Authority should therefore issue joint guidance to ensure a uniform risk-weighting regime for guaranteed assets.
Institutional adaptation in the labour market is equally non-negotiable. Current legislation treats night work as overtime, attracting a 150 % premium that defeats the economics of continuous production. A pragmatic amendment could replace overtime with a shift differential pegged at 125 % of base pay, conditional on certified safeguards such as ISO-compliant occupational-health protocols and mandatory rest-cycle scheduling.
Tripartite agreements in Mauritius and Morocco demonstrate that worker fatigue and retention risks diminish once transparent rosters and embedded health services are in place—lessons Ghana can emulate. Complementary adjustments to the National Daily Minimum Wage, last revised to GH₵18.15 in January 2024, must be calibrated so that relative wage differentials reward night productivity without triggering a spiral in unit labour costs. Parallel social-protection measures—particularly subsidised night-shift childcare and safe-transport vouchers—are essential for gender inclusion, given that household caregiving norms otherwise discourage female participation.
The physical backbone of a round-the-clock economy rests overwhelmingly on reliable and affordable electricity. Government has pledged an additional 1,000 MW of firm capacity through a mix of gas-peakers and utility-scale battery storage co-located with solar assets. Financing such buffers through green-bond issuances structured around feed-in tariffs can limit sovereign borrowing costs while meeting the climate-mainstreaming tests now embedded in concessional windows of the African Development Bank and Climate Investment Funds.
Downstream distribution upgrades—smart meters, sectionalised feeders and real-time reporting dashboards—reduce non-technical losses that still hover above 30 % in some enclaves, thereby narrowing the tariff-recovery gap. In parallel, street-lighting projects and CCTV expansions in municipal commerce zones will mitigate crime-perception risks that inflate private-security overheads for SMEs. The Ministry of the Interior has announced plans to double night-patrol coverage in pilot corridors, supported by dedicated intergovernmental transfers to local-government service assemblies.
Digital infrastructure constitutes the second spine. While mobile-money penetration exceeds 90 % of adults, only ≈33 % of registered SMEs accept electronic payments; hardware costs and transaction-fee concerns dominate the refusal calculus. Opening GhanaPay and other real-time gross-settlement rails to third-party fintechs at tiered interchange fees would shift small-ticket transactions away from cash, improve traceability for tax purposes and build the data exhaust needed for credit-scoring algorithms. Open-API logistics and warehousing platforms should follow, allowing perishable agro-processors in Kumasi and Sunyani to match inventory with off-peak trucking and cold-chain capacity in real time.
Financing the hardware and software of night production ultimately requires a catalytic public share that can be amortised over a 15–25-year horizon vis-à-vis the shorter pay-back windows of private capital. A blended facility capitalised at GH₵2 billion from budget resources and multilateral trust funds, matched by GH₵6 billion in private and development-finance-institution commitments, would reach a leverage ratio of 1:3. Energy-buffer capital expenditures can feasibly support a sovereign-to-independent-power-producer split of 60:40, yielding a modest leverage of 1.5:1 but ensuring sufficient public control over tariff pass-throughs in the early learning phase. Digital-platform investments, by contrast, can operate on a 30:70 split given the higher risk appetite of venture capital in the technology space and the relatively light-asset profile of e-commerce businesses.
For execution credibility, sequencing is indispensable. Pilot operations centred on the Tema free-zone industrial enclave and the Kumasi agro-processing hub over 2025–26 will test the systemic interactions of energy reliability, labour compliance and security provisioning on a manageable scale of 300 SMEs and a 15 MW incremental night load.
Success triggers investment commitments for a scale-up phase across the Accra–Takoradi logistics corridor and Sunyani’s agro-clusters through 2027–29, raising SME participation to ≈2,000 firms and night demand to 75 MW. By 2030–32 the programme can target 10 regional clusters, with ≈7,500 SMEs operating extended hours and delivering an incremental US $10 billion in SME gross value added. The phasing is not cosmetic: it absorbs learning curves, staggers public-expenditure outlays to remain within medium-term fiscal anchors and allows the central bank to calibrate its balance-sheet risk.
No economic policy is risk-free and the 24-hour agenda is unusually exposed to multichannel hazards. Unmanaged, a simultaneous uptake by energy-intensive sectors could overload grid nodes and reverse recent gains in blackout reduction. A staggered time-of-use pricing schedule aligned with an independent Tariff Review Board can smooth aggregate demand while preserving the price signal.
Wage-push inflation is another threat; however, productivity-linked grants and a gradually tapering shift differential can keep unit labour costs within a band consistent with the inflation-targeting framework overseen by the Bank of Ghana. Labour-rights violations—from excessive shift lengths to inadequate transport home—pose reputational and human-capital risks.
Electronic biometric time-sheets, mandatory labour-inspectorate audits and cross-institutional data-sharing agreements can raise detection certainty and reduce incidence. Finally, the fiscal position could deteriorate if rebate schemes or public-investment overruns exceed the assumed ceiling of 0.5 % of GDP. Built-in sunset clauses, mid-year expenditure reviews and quarterly publication of cost-benefit dashboards by a National 24-Hour Economy Council co-chaired by the Ministry of Finance and Energy Commission will be essential guardrails.
If these risks are managed, developmental dividends extend well beyond headline GDP. Rotational shifts expand labour-market entry points for youth while flexible scheduling and subsidised night-shift childcare can lift female participation by ≈15 percentage points. Night-economy precincts catalyse complementary public-goods investments in street lighting, sanitation and late-night mass transit, thereby upgrading urban liveability indicators. Strategically, seamless 24-hour logistics corridors linking Tema, Accra, Takoradi and the Abidjan–Lagos route could reduce door-to-door transit times by ≈20 %, strengthening Ghanaian SMEs’ capacity to exploit African Continental Free Trade Area rules-of-origin preferences.
The political economy of reform is favourable. Both major parties have now adopted versions of the 24-hour concept, with the Mahama-led opposition first articulating a strategy document that highlights incentive packages aimed at slashing the cost of doing business and expanding essential-service coverage. Government, for its part, has announced that a formal launch will occur on Republic Day, positioning the agenda as a national compact rather than a partisan promise. This bipartisan convergence provides a window for technocrats to embed hard targets, fiscal guardrails and evidence-based triggers that will survive election cycles.
The conversation is therefore shifting from whether to embrace a night-time economy to how to design one that preserves macro-stability while catalysing productivity. For macroeconomists the chief analytic challenge is to refine total-factor-productivity assumptions so that growth projections remain tethered to plausible capital-deepening and learning-curve dynamics.
For public-financial-management specialists the task lies in structuring incentive regimes that are self-liquidating and in sequencing public investments to avoid front-loaded debt accumulation. SME-development experts must translate credit-line announcements into accessible lending windows tailored to collateral and tenor realities. Energy economists need to marry capacity-expansion plans with granular grid-stability modelling. Employment analysts must monitor whether the promised 1 million jobs tilt toward vulnerable cohorts or merely re-allocate existing labour.
A thoughtfully sequenced 24-hour policy—rooted in reliable energy, adaptive labour codes, targeted fiscal and monetary facilitation, and transparent governance—can elevate SMEs into the fulcrum of Ghana’s next growth chapter. The potential US $11 billion GDP boost, 1 million new jobs and ≈GH₵18 billion in additional tax revenue projected by 2028 are not automatic entitlements; they are contingent on disciplined execution and a willingness to learn and adapt at each phase. If these conditions are met, time will indeed become Ghana’s newest and most inclusive factor of production, lighting up local enterprise far beyond the setting sun.
The writer is the Executive Director, IDER
