The Bill That Never Clocks In: Why Ghana's Workplace Safety Law Cannot Wait Any Longer

A law that keeps missing its shift
Every working day in Ghana, a bricklayer climbs unguarded scaffold, a factory hand reaches into an unshielded machine and a nurse ends a 8-hour shift or more with no one checking whether she is safe.

All of them are waiting for the same thing: a law that brings together the protection of every worker, in every sector, under one roof. That law, the Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) Bill, has been drafted, put out for public comment and promised for years. It still is not law.

This article explains what the bill would do, what the delay is costing Ghana socially, environmentally and economically, and why it must be finished and passed now.

What the bill is, and what it would change

Ghana has been promising this law for a long time. In April 2019, the government said Parliament would pass the OSH Bill by the end of that year (Ghana Business News). It did not. A later draft, which proposed a National Occupational Safety and Health Authority (NOSHA), was open for public comment from May 2024 to April 2025 (Ghana Business Regulatory Reforms Portal). In November 2025, the Ministry of Labour, Jobs and Employment said a bill would be presented to Parliament (Daily Graphic).

The bill has still not reached Parliament. On 24 August 2026, Employment Minister Dr Abdul-Rashid Pelpuo said his ministry was preparing a new bill on workplace safety, health and working conditions, and was working with stakeholders to develop it (CitiNewsroom). Seven years after the 2019 promise, the law is still at the drafting stage.

In November 2025, Dr Daniel Ayikwei, who chairs the Health and Safety Committee of the Ministry's Special Taskforce, said the bill would merge the Labour Act, 2003 (Act 651), the Factories, Offices and Shops Act, 1970 (Act 328) and related rules into one enforceable framework. It would apply to industries, factories, offices, shops and construction sites across the country.

The bill would also introduce compliance registration and certification, backed by penalties and administrative fines for employers who do not comply, and it sets out fees for safety training and audits. To end the duplication that weakens enforcement today, it would require the agencies involved to work together. It would also monitor working conditions, sanitation, welfare facilities and the use of personal protective equipment (PPE).

Dr Ayikwei also said the law would help the state stop losing scarce skilled workers to accidents, injuries and deaths.

How Ghana manages workplace safety today

Without the bill, workplace safety in Ghana depends on a patchwork of laws, most of them old and each covering only part of the workforce:

The Factories, Offices and Shops Act, 1970 (Act 328) covers safety in factories, offices and shops. The Workmen's Compensation Act, 1987 (PNDCL 187) provides compensation for work injuries and occupational diseases. The Labour Act, 2003 (Act 651) sets out general employer duties, including reporting workplace accidents within seven days. Separate minerals and mining regulations, made at various times, cover safety in licensed mines.

Ghana's first national OSH Profile, launched with the ILO in October 2025, describes the result (ILO). With no central authority, several agencies share overlapping responsibilities. Systems for recording and analysing occupational injuries and diseases are poor. Occupational health services reach only about 20% of the country, specialised facilities are few, and there are too few inspectors to visit workplaces regularly.

The informal sector faces the greatest risk. More than 70% of Ghana's workforce is informal (Daily Graphic), and most of these workers fall outside the existing laws.

The Factories Act is now more than 55 years old. It was written for a Ghana with no call centres, no mobile money agents, no ride-hailing drivers, no e-waste recyclers and no large-scale gig economy.

Social impacts: lives, families and dignity

The human cost of the delay can be counted. Between 2020 and 2024, Ghana recorded 4,647 occupational accidents, which caused 140 deaths and 4,108 non-fatal injuries (Daily Graphic). In 2025, another 1,382 accidents were reported, followed by 521 in the first half of 2026 (News Ghana). These figures only count accidents that were reported.

Behind these numbers are families pushed into poverty. When a breadwinner is killed or disabled, children may leave school and spouses take on debt. In a country where many households depend on one income, a single workplace accident can affect a whole extended family. Workers who lose limbs, sight or hearing often cannot return to their trade, and Ghana has no structured system to rehabilitate or retrain them.

Informal workers are left out almost entirely. Kayayei, okada riders, artisans, farmers and galamsey workers make up most of the workforce, yet they have almost no legal protection when they are hurt at work. Women and young workers face particular risks: head porters carry heavy loads, women in fish smoking breathe smoke all day, and apprentices often work without any training. The current laws barely recognise these hazards.

Mental health is also ignored. Stress, harassment, burnout and violence against workers, including health workers, have no clear place in Ghana's safety law today. And when workers see colleagues injured with no one held responsible, they lose faith in their employers and in the state.

Environmental impacts: when workplace hazards reach the community

Workplace safety and environmental safety are closely linked. A hazard that is not controlled inside the workplace often ends up in the air, water and soil that communities depend on.

Small-scale gold miners handle mercury with bare hands and burn it in the open. The mercury poisons the miners first, then enters rivers such as the Pra, Ankobra and Offin, where it reaches the drinking water and fish of whole communities. In places like Agbogbloshie, workers who burn cables and electronics breathe toxic fumes, and the same smoke and ash contaminate soil and food in the surrounding neighbourhoods. On farms, workers who spray pesticides without protective gear are poisoned, and careless handling of chemicals pollutes water sources and harms wildlife.

Sometimes the damage is sudden. In January 2022, a truck carrying mining explosives exploded near Apiate in the Western Region, killing 17 people, injuring hundreds and flattening the community (Business & Human Rights Resource Centre). A workplace hazard became a community disaster. Factories without proper safety controls cause slower harm, exposing workers to dust, fumes and noise and releasing the same pollutants into nearby homes.

A modern OSH law, working alongside environmental regulations, would require hazards to be controlled at the source: inside the workplace, before they reach workers or communities.

Economic impacts: a bill Ghana is already paying

The delay is often presented as a way to avoid burdening businesses. In reality, Ghana is already paying a high price for unsafe work.

Period	Compensation paid for workplace injuries
2020–2024 (five years)	GH¢52.0 million
2025 (one year)	GH¢34.25 million
January–June 2026 (six months)	GH¢28.56 million

Daily Graphic; News Ghana. These are nominal cedi figures from two sources, Daily Graphic for 2020–2024 and the Labour Department for 2025–2026, so part of the increase reflects the high inflation of 2022–2023 rather than more accidents alone; even so, the scale of the jump shows how costly unsafe work has become.

In just 18 months, from January 2025 to June 2026, compensation payouts exceeded the total for the previous five years. And compensation is only the visible part of the cost.

Every injured worker means lost working days, delayed projects and overtime for colleagues, and employers then pay to recruit and train replacements. Workplace injuries and occupational diseases also end up in public hospitals and on the National Health Insurance Scheme, even though they could have been prevented.

The losses add up at national level. The Ghana Employers' Association has cited estimates that about 4% of global GDP is lost each year to occupational accidents and diseases (Daily Graphic). Applied to Ghana's economy, losses on that scale would run into billions of cedis. International investors, buyers and lenders increasingly ask for proof of safe working conditions, so a weak OSH regime can cost Ghana contracts, exports and financing. And at a time when Ghana is already struggling to keep skilled workers, losing them to preventable injuries makes the problem worse.

Answering the objections

Four objections come up most often. The first is that the bill will burden small businesses. Registration, audits and fines do add costs, especially for small firms. But the bill can set requirements in proportion to size and risk, since a small tailoring shop does not need the same audit as a gold mine. The cost of one serious accident, through compensation, lost work and damaged reputation, is often far higher than the cost of prevention.

The second objection is that Ghana already has laws. It does, but they are old, scattered and cover only part of the workforce, and that fragmentation is the reason enforcement fails.

The third is that a new authority will mean more bureaucracy. In practice, a single authority can reduce it. Employers would deal with one regulator instead of several overlapping ones, and the bill specifically aims to end duplicated enforcement.

The fourth objection is that enforcement will be weak anyway. This is a real risk. A law without inspectors, funding and data will not save lives, which is why the bill must come with resources and the practical systems described later in this article. The answer to weak enforcement is to fund the law properly once it passes.

Why the bill must be passed now

The costs are rising quickly. Compensation paid in the first half of 2026 alone was more than half of what Ghana paid over the five years from 2020 to 2024, and every month of delay adds to the bill.

The groundwork is also done. The ILO-supported OSH Profile has identified the gaps, and a national OSH policy and enforcement taskforce are already in place (Health and Safety International). What is missing is a finished bill, laid before Parliament and passed. Employers and workers agree on this. The Ghana Employers' Association, trade unions, safety professionals and doctors have all called for the bill, and business and labour rarely agree this clearly.

Ghana's economy has changed too. Gig work, digital services, oil and gas, and a large informal sector all need protections that laws from the 1970s never anticipated.

Ghana's reputation is also at stake. In November 2026, Accra hosts AfriSAFE, the Africa Safety Congress and Awards (CitiNewsroom). Ghana should not welcome Africa's safety leaders while its own safety law remains unpassed. Timing matters for another reason: experts have warned that if a bill is not passed before a Parliament's term ends, it must be reintroduced and the process starts again (Daily Graphic). Delay now could cost years later.

Beyond the bill: solutions Ghana does not have yet

Passing the bill is only the first step. To make it work, Ghana needs tools it does not currently have.

The first is a firm deadline. The Ministry should publish a timetable for finishing the bill and laying it before Parliament, and Parliament's employment committee should commit to dates for hearings, debate and a vote, so the public can hold both to account.

Ghana also needs a digital accident register: a national online and USSD reporting system, linked to the Ghana Card and SSNIT, that lets employers report accidents in minutes and lets the new authority see trends in real time. Hospitals should feed into it too. When a hospital treats a work injury, an automatic notice should go to the regulator, and if no employer report follows within seven days, a penalty should be triggered.

Informal workers need cover of their own. A low-cost occupational injury scheme, paid through small mobile money contributions via trade associations, would give them a safety net for the first time. To pay for enforcement, penalties collected under the new law should go into a dedicated OSH Fund for inspectors, training and worker rehabilitation, rather than into general revenue.

Health services must change as well. Every district hospital should have staff trained to diagnose and report work-related illnesses, such as silicosis in miners, pesticide poisoning in farmers and hearing loss in factory workers. Basic safety training in local languages should be part of every apprenticeship and a condition for registering a business.

Finally, Ghana should publish an annual safety scorecard ranking sectors and large employers by accident rate, which would reward safe companies and shame dangerous ones. It should ratify ILO Conventions 155 and 187. Since 2022 these have been among the ILO's ten fundamental conventions, and they are the only two of the ten that Ghana has not ratified. And the new authority and the EPA should inspect high-risk sites together, so that hazards to workers and to communities are tackled at the same time.

Conclusion

Ghana's Occupational Safety and Health Bill was promised for 2019, put out for public comment in 2024 and called for by employers and unions. In 2026 it is still being drafted. Meanwhile, the costs keep rising.

The toll is already on record. Between 2020 and 2024, workplace accidents killed 140 people and injured more than 4,000. Mercury, e-waste smoke, pesticides and explosives carry workplace hazards into rivers, soil and neighbourhoods. And compensation paid in the last 18 months exceeded the previous five years combined, before anyone counts lost output or hospital costs.

Passing the bill will not solve every problem overnight. It will need inspectors, funding, data and practical tools such as a digital accident register, injury cover for informal workers and an OSH fund financed by fines. But without the law, none of these can be built on solid ground.

The evidence is in, and employers and unions are already behind the bill. What is missing is a finished bill, a date for laying it before Parliament, and a vote. Every day it is delayed, more Ghanaian workers clock in and do not return home the same way.

RICHMOND ABABIO
HEALTH, SAFETY AND ENVIRONMENT EXPERT