Occupational Health Crisis In Ghana: Who Will Save The Employees?

Ghana does not yet have a comprehensive national policy or law on occupational health and safety, despite the requirements of International Labour Organization Convention 155, which the country ratified decades ago. This single fact sits at the centre of what has quietly become one of the more serious, if underreported, public health and labour crises facing the country.

Workers across mining, construction, healthcare, transport and the vast informal sector continue to face preventable injury, illness and death, while the institutional architecture meant to protect them remains fragmented, underfunded and, in critical respects, incomplete. The question this raises is not rhetorical. If the state, employers and existing regulators are not fully equipped to protect Ghana's workforce, who actually will?

A legal framework with gaps at its core
Ghana's principal instrument governing workplace conditions remains the Factories, Offices and Shops Act of 1970, more than half a century old, supplemented by provisions in the Labour Act 651 of 2003. Under the Labour Act, employers are obligated to supply safety appliances, protective equipment and firefighting provisions at no cost to workers, to provide clean drinking water and adequate sanitation facilities, and to report occupational accidents and diseases to the appropriate government agency within seven days.

Workers, correspondingly, cannot lawfully be dismissed or have wages withheld for removing themselves from a situation they reasonably believe poses imminent danger to their life or health. Yet researchers examining this legislation have consistently found that it is not specific about how safety provisions should be implemented at the organizational level, does not clearly define what constitutes an occupational illness, and leaves standards largely to the discretion of individual employers. The result is a patchwork of oversight: a Road Safety Commission with limited standards for the transport sector, Mining Regulations dating to 1970 for the extractive industries, and no single national body coordinating occupational health and safety across the economy as a whole.

Mining: progress that remains fragile
Mining offers both the clearest evidence that improvement is possible and a sobering reminder of how far the sector still has to go. The Ghana Chamber of Mines reported that fatalities in the formal mining sector fell from seven in 2024 to three in 2025, alongside thirty-four serious accidents and two hundred and ten first-aid cases, prompting the launch of a 2026 Inter-Mines First Aid and Safety Competition under the theme "Safety First, Safety Always." Chamber officials have been candid that even this improved toll represents one fatality too many, and have flagged particular concern over safety lapses among contractors operating on mine sites, who continue to account for a disproportionate share of incidents.

Academic analysis of accident records across Ghana's mining industry has found that mining equipment is associated with the vast majority of both injuries and fatalities, with mechanics, truck operators and laborers among the most affected occupations, and maintenance work among the most dangerous activities.

Beneath the formal sector, artisanal and small-scale gold mining, the activity Ghanaians popularly call galamsey, remains far more hazardous still, with research from mining communities documenting widespread violations of basic occupational safety standards and injuries concentrated among the legs, knees and feet from struck-by incidents and falls.

Construction and the informal economy
The construction sector tells a similar story of documented risk without commensurate protection. Research into Ghana's construction industry has found that occupational health and safety practices, where properly implemented, have a statistically significant positive effect on worker performance and align well with international best practice, yet frequent industrial accidents and disease continue to claim workers' lives and undermine organizational performance across the sector.

Ghana's fast-growing labour force and its correspondingly large informal sector compound this problem, since small and medium enterprises and informal workers are consistently the least studied and least protected group in the country's occupational health literature. The World Health Organization has estimated that poor occupational health and reduced working capacity can cost a country between ten and twenty percent of its Gross National Product, a figure that should alarm policymakers far beyond the labour ministry alone.

Healthcare workers: protecting those who protect us
Ghana's own health workers, the people relied upon to treat everyone else's occupational injuries, face a distinct set of risks that the system has been slow to address. Studies of healthcare workers in Accra found that while respondents demonstrated very high knowledge of occupational health and safety principles, this knowledge diverged sharply from actual practice, leaving staff exposed to biological hazards including blood borne infections.

This local strain sits inside a continental crisis: a World Health Organization report launched in Accra in May 2026 found that nearly forty-six percent of African health workers report intentions to migrate, driven by poor working conditions and limited career opportunities, while absenteeism linked to these conditions is estimated to erode up to twenty percent of the wage bill across health systems on the continent.

The psychosocial dimension the country is only beginning to name
Perhaps the most significant recent shift in Ghana's occupational health conversation is the growing recognition that safety cannot be measured by accident statistics alone.

At the University of Ghana's 2026 World Day for Safety and Health at Work commemoration in April, held under the theme of good psychosocial working environments, speakers cited International Labour Organization estimates that approximately 2.93 million workers die globally each year from occupational accidents or work-related disease, roughly eight thousand deaths daily, with a further 374 to 395 million sustaining non-fatal injuries and illnesses annually.

Ghanaian mining sector leaders speaking separately at a University of Mines and Technology symposium acknowledged that the country's safety efforts have historically focused on visible, physical hazards, and called for psychosocial safety, covering workload pressure, fatigue, burnout, depression and unfair labour practices, to be integrated into existing safety systems rather than treated as a secondary concern. The Minister of Labour, Jobs and Employment, Dr Abdul-Rashid Hassan Pelpuo, used his own appearance at the Accra conference to affirm government commitment to strengthening the legislative and regulatory environment around workplace safety, with explicit attention to psychosocial dimensions long overlooked by traditional frameworks.

So who will save the employees
The honest answer is that no single actor currently positioned within Ghana's occupational health architecture can carry this responsibility alone. Employers hold direct, day-to-day power over working conditions but the evidence shows uneven and often inadequate voluntary compliance, particularly among contractors and within the informal sector.

Regulators, from the Minerals Commission's Inspectorate Division to sector-specific bodies, operate with fragmented mandates and no unifying national authority to coordinate standards across industries. Government holds the legislative power to close the gap left since 1970 but has yet to enact the comprehensive national occupational health and safety policy that ILO Convention 155 requires, though ministerial statements in 2026 suggest rising political attention to the issue.

Workers themselves, through unions and increasingly through their own refusal to accept unsafe conditions as the unavoidable cost of employment, remain an underused source of pressure for reform. Realistically, protecting Ghana's workforce will require all four actors moving in the same direction simultaneously: a modernized legal framework, a properly resourced and unified regulatory body, employers who treat safety as a non-negotiable operating cost rather than a discretionary expense, and workers empowered to report hazards without fear of retaliation.

Conclusion
Ghana's workers, in mines, on construction sites, in hospital wards and behind the wheels of long-distance transport vehicles, continue to bear risks that decades-old legislation and fragmented oversight have failed to adequately address. The growing attention to psychosocial safety and the ministerial commitments made in 2026 are genuine, welcome signals of momentum. But signals are not statute, and goodwill from individual mining companies, however commendable, cannot substitute for the comprehensive national occupational health and safety policy Ghana has lacked for too long.

Until that policy exists and is properly enforced, the question of who will save Ghana's employees will remain, uncomfortably, everyone's responsibility and therefore no one's guarantee.

Mustapha Bature Sallama.
Medical/ Science Communicator,
Private Investigator, Criminal investigation and Intelligence Analysis.
International Conflict Management and Peace Building.USIP
mustysallama@gmail.com
+233-555-275-880

References
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"2026 World Day for Safety and Health at Work Focuses on Psychosocial Safety." University of Mines and Technology, June 2026. https://www.umat.edu.gh/media-press/news/2026-world-day-for-safety-and-health-at-work-focuses-on-psychosocial-safety

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