Ghana became a surrogacy hub: what is attracting global clients and what is being left unregulated
A quiet industry outgrows its laws
Ghana has, within roughly a decade, become one of Africa's busiest destinations for international surrogacy. Agencies advertising to intended parents in the United States, Canada, Europe and the Gulf now list Accra, Tema and Kumasi alongside Georgia, Mexico and Colombia as places where a child can be conceived and legally handed over to foreign parents. The pitch is consistent: lower cost, faster matching, and a "safe, culturally sensitive" environment. What is less advertised is that Ghana is doing all this without a dedicated surrogacy law.
Why intended parents are choosing Ghana
The commercial case is straightforward. Full surrogacy packages in Ghana are marketed from roughly 49,000 to 50,000 US dollars, a fraction of the 120,000 to 200,000 dollars typically quoted for American programmes. Clinics in Accra work with US- and Canada-trained reproductive endocrinologists, English is the official language, and agencies report surrogate-matching timelines measured in weeks rather than months. Ghana's political stability, compared with much of the region, is repeatedly cited by agencies as a selling point for clients wary of instability elsewhere on the continent.
There is also a global displacement effect driving demand toward Africa. India, Thailand, Nepal and Cambodia, once the preferred low-cost destinations for international surrogacy, have all closed their doors to foreign intended parents over the past decade after successive scandals and tightened domestic law. As those markets shut, agencies and intended parents began searching for the next viable jurisdiction, and West and East Africa, Ghana in particular, moved into focus.
Growing Families, an international surrogacy information platform, notes that the practice in Ghana dates back to at least 2017, with clients originally drawn from neighboring African countries before Western nationals followed. Newer entrants such as Afrigha Surrogacy have announced plans for a consolidated Accra facility intended to position the country as a regional hub for what the industry calls ethical assisted reproduction.
The legal foundation is thinner than the marketing suggests
Surrogacy's only real anchor in Ghanaian law is Section 22 of the Registration of Births and Deaths Act, 2020 (Act 1027), which allows intended parents to apply for a pre-birth or post-birth parental order recognizing them as legal parents. That provision was written primarily to regulate civil registration, not to govern the surrogacy industry itself. Legal analysts at Koranteng & Koranteng have pointed out that Act 1027 is silent on the minimum age for a surrogate, the specific requirements for entering a surrogacy arrangement, donor anonymity, and the legal status of embryos once they cross borders.
A dedicated Assisted Reproductive Technologies Bill has been in draft form since 2021, developed with the Fertility Society of Ghana, and the Ministry of Health has said the underlying policy is at an advanced stage ahead of submission to Parliament. Ernest Konadu Asiedu of the Ministry's Technical Coordination Directorate has said the legislation is meant to create oversight of fertility centers and agents and to protect the rights of both surrogates and intended parents.
That bill has now been pending for roughly five years.
Academic research published this year in a peer-reviewed Ghanaian study of ART practitioners, facility owners and regulators found no existing ethical or legal framework governing the sector at all, and concluded that providers are largely relying on their own interpretation of international norms rather than any binding domestic standard.
Who bears the risk in the meantime
The absence of legislation is not a neutral gap. Researchers who interviewed surrogates and so-called baby agents in Ghana between 2018 and 2019 documented a pattern in which agents played an outsized, largely unsupervised role in recruiting and managing women through dedicated "surrogacy homes," often isolating them from their own families for the duration of the pregnancy.
The same research described surrogacy contracts as frequently oppressive in structure, reinforcing agents' control over surrogates' bodies with limited independent legal protection. Growing Families' own client-facing material confirms that Ghanaian surrogates are typically housed away from home under supervised accommodation with restricted contact with intended parents, framing as standard practice what researchers have flagged as a labour rights concern.
This is the same regulatory blind spot that has made cross-border reproductive arrangements vulnerable to exploitation elsewhere, including in cases this column has previously examined involving embryo trafficking through Northern Cyprus. Ghana's situation is not identical, commercial surrogacy is at least acknowledged in statute, but the underlying risk is structurally similar: a lucrative, internationally facilitated industry moving faster than the state's capacity to license, inspect or discipline the intermediaries operating within it.
Religious and cultural resistance compounds the ambiguity.
A study of Islamic, Christian and traditionalist perspectives in Ghana found that religious leaders across faiths generally accept assisted reproduction between married couples using their own gametes, but do not endorse third-party arrangements such as surrogacy or gamete donation, while traditionalists reject ART altogether as an interference with natural procreation. That leaves the surrogacy industry operating in a legal and moral grey zone even as it markets itself internationally as Africa's most stable option.
The security and governance angle
For a country positioning itself as West Africa's reproductive-tourism gateway, the stakes go beyond individual family law disputes. An unregulated fertility and surrogacy sector creates conditions for exactly the kind of transnational exploitation, of surrogate mothers, of donor material, of vulnerable women recruited through informal agent networks, that has drawn law enforcement and diplomatic attention in other jurisdictions. Ghana's Ministry of Health appears aware of the exposure; the question is whether the Assisted Reproductive Technologies Bill reaches Parliament before the industry it is meant to govern grows larger still.
Mustapha Bature Sallama.
Medical/ Science Communicator,
Private Investigator, Criminal investigation and Intelligence Analysis.
International Conflict Management and Peace Building.USIP
mustysallama@gmail.com
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References
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