Ghana Can’t Build a 24-Hour Manufacturing Economy on an Empty Raw Materials Base
If Ghana is serious about building a 24-hour economy powered by manufacturing, it must first get serious about what fuels manufacturing, raw materials. Cocoa processors are underutilized, cashew factories are collapsing, and the government has announced to implement a phased ban on the export of raw shea nuts by 2026. These aren’t just scattered sectoral problems. They are early warning signs that the foundation of Ghana’s industrial dream is at risk.
Manufacturing thrives on raw material availability. The idea behind the 24-hour economy is to expand factory operations, scale exports, and reduce dependence on imports. But none of that is possible when local processors can’t get inputs, and exporters offer farmers higher prices to ship raw goods. The consequence? Ghana’s processing capacity is idle, and the promise of industrial jobs is fading before it even gets started.
As Bright Simons has pointed out, many local cocoa processors operate at 10–40% capacity, not because they’re inefficient, but because they can’t get cocoa. Some have even had to import beans just to stay in business. The reason? COCOBOD prioritizes forward sales for foreign exchange, limiting domestic access. While that may help manage reserves in the short term, it directly undermines the long-term industrialization plan. You can’t promote chocolate-making if chocolate makers can’t access cocoa.
The cashew industry is even more fragile. This week, the Association of Cashew Processors Ghana (ACPG) issued a stark warning: unregulated exports are sabotaging Ghana’s 24-hour economy. Foreign merchants are flooding rural markets with cash, outbidding local processors for raw cashew nuts. As a result, factories are shutting down, jobs are disappearing (especially among rural women and youth), and entire value chains are breaking because primary processors can’t function, and secondary processors have no input. Despite years of talking about cashew as a “strategic export,” ACPG says there’s no real enforcement, no working capital, and no plan.
The government announced a phased ban on raw shea nut exports by 2026, along with plans to rehabilitate the Buipe Shea Factory. For years, shea has been an underutilized women-led industry. With the ban and factory rehabilitation, Ghana has a chance to build a regional hub for cosmetics and food-grade shea processing, if the implementation is right. But even here, the message is clear: if raw exports remain more attractive than local processing, policy will always lose to price.
Ghana’s manufacturing vision won’t work unless processing becomes more rewarding than exporting. That means enforcing export restrictions where needed, prioritising local supply in pricing models (especially in cocoa), offering tax and power incentives to processors, not just exporters, and making sure that access to raw materials is protected and predictable before factories are scaled up.
The idea of 24-hour industrial growth cannot run on empty factories or idle capacity. It must be built on a governed raw materials pipeline that supports domestic value addition first. Here’s the danger: if exporting raw cocoa, cashew, or shea stays more attractive than processing them locally, Ghana will continue to export its raw potential, only to import it back, transformed, and pay a premium for it.
The political will to industrialize is here. But Ghana will not manufacture at scale until it stops incentivizing raw material exports over domestic value addition. We need a system where processors come first, where policy backs local factories with raw material access, energy reliability, and working capital, and where adding value in Ghana is more profitable than shipping it out raw. If we don’t fix this, we’ll be running factories on imported inputs, not because we lack the resources, but because we refused to protect them.
