Financial Security (FinSec) Series with Dr Philip Takyi: Africa’s pension crisis: How pension reform and personal planning can secure the future of millions

Every public infrastructure tender in Ghana ends with the same implicit question: who offered the lowest price?

Imagine running a business that speaks fluent English, only to discover that your three most important partners each insist on being addressed in a language you have never learned.

For much of the past decade, fraud risk in Ghana’s financial system was primarily a banking-sector story — ATM skimming, cheque fraud, cash suppression by tellers, and the occasional cyber intrusion. That story has changed.

I must say I was particularly impressed when I saw that my bankers had installed a technology that allowed customers to get a queue number without any human intervention.

Consider two government hospitals in the same city, funded by the same ministry, operating under the same national health policy, staffed by public servants on identical salary scales, and serving populations with broadly similar needs.

Some men build institutions. Others build the people who go on to build institutions.

A few weeks ago, I ran into a former student of mine at a fuel station in Accra.

For decades, career advice rested on a single and deceptively comforting axiom that working hard to deliver exceptional results would naturally ensure that recognition followed.