92% of Ghanaian businesses operate informally – GSS report

About 92% of businesses in Ghana operate informally, despite a near tripling of business establishments over the past decade, raising concerns about job creation and the growth of small businesses. Government Statistician, Dr Alhassan Iddrisu, disclosed this at the launch of the ‘Ghana in Numbers 2025’ publication by the Ghana Statistical Service in Accra. According to the Service’s first Integrated Business Establishment Survey (IBES-1), Ghana recorded 2.64 million business establishments in 2024, with 9 in 10 classified as micro businesses. “Only 7.7% are formal. In other words, I’m talking about 92% of our businesses or enterprises being informal,” Dr Iddrisu said. He noted that establishments nearly tripled between 2014 and 2024, while the number of people working in them doubled. “What does that mean? Businesses are multiplying faster than the jobs inside them,” he said, highlighting concerns about the ability of business expansion to generate sufficient employment. Unemployment declined from 14.6% in 2023 to 12.8% in 2025, but more than 7 in 10 jobs remain informal. Dr Iddrisu said about 12 million Ghanaians are aged between 15 and 35, yet almost 1 in 3 young jobseekers aged between 15 and 24 cannot find work. “Close to 2 million young people are neither working nor in education or training,” he said, adding that more than 6 in 10 of them are young women. He warned that Ghana’s ability to benefit from its growing youth population would depend on decisions about education, skills and employment. “Ghana’s youth window is open, but it is closing. Our choices on schooling, skills, jobs in the next 10 years will decide whether it becomes a dividend or a burden,” he said The report also highlights contrasting economic trends. Inflation fell from 54.1% in December 2022 to 5.4% in December 2025, while food insecurity rose from 37.7% in 2024 to 39.8% in 2025, affecting an estimated 13 million people. “The progress is real. But it is not shared evenly,” Dr Iddrisu said. The publication further recorded GH¢38.4 billion in informal cross-border trade with Togo, Burkina Faso and Côte d’Ivoire, providing new insight into commercial activities that have not been fully captured in official trade statistics. Dr Iddrisu urged businesses and investors to use the findings to guide their decisions, stressing the need to support small enterprises to expand and formalise. “Helping small firms grow and formalise deserves serious attention,” he said. He said the Ghana in Numbers 2025 publication and its accompanying online portal would provide national and district-level statistics to support evidence-based planning, investment and policymaking. “For us, producing statistics is no longer the finish line. For us, use is the finish line or, if you want, impact is the finish line,” he said. The findings underscored the need for policies that help businesses formalise, create jobs and translate economic growth into improved livelihoods.