- Ghana’s 2027 Budget Must Reinforce Anti-Corruption and Procurement Controls — CSOs
Civil society organisations have urged the government to use the 2027 Budget Statement and Economic Policy to strengthen Ghana’s accountability and anti-corruption architecture, warning that weak institutional capacity, inadequate resources, procurement vulnerabilities and poor access to public information continue to undermine effective oversight.
Speaking during the CSOs’ 2027 Budget Inputs engagement, Solomon Nyankah, Monitoring and Evaluation Officer at the Ghana Anti-Corruption Coalition, said government must provide adequate resources and greater operational autonomy to key accountability institutions if they are to discharge their mandates effectively. “This is a call that we’ve been making almost all the time providing adequate resources and also granting the independence or the autonomy of the key accountability and anti-corruption institutions,” he said.
Mr Nyankah argued that the challenge extends beyond the Office of the Special Prosecutor, noting that several institutions responsible for accountability, investigation, prosecution and audit either lack sufficient resources or face constraints that weaken their operational effectiveness. The CSOs are therefore calling for stronger institutional safeguards, adequate financing and enforcement mechanisms that allow these bodies to function with greater independence.
The group also wants the government to strengthen Ghana’s whistleblower protection regime. Although legislation exists to protect and incentivise whistleblowers, Mr Nyankah said implementation remains weak, particularly in relation to provisions intended to reward individuals whose disclosures result in the recovery of public resources.
“As part of this, we want the government to pay attention to, especially the provision that talks about the 10 per cent reward to whistleblowers,” he said. The argument is that whistleblower protections become far less credible if the legal incentives and financial mechanisms supporting them are not operationalised in practice.
Public procurement emerged as another major area of concern. Mr Nyankah said recent work undertaken by the CSOs around procurement uncovered concerns involving corruption, bribery and kickbacks, reinforcing the need for stronger scrutiny of procurement methods and closer compliance with the Public Procurement Act.
According to the group, procurement data showed that competitive tendering accounted for a larger number of procurement activities, but the monetary value attached to restricted tendering was disproportionately high. That pattern, Mr Nyankah argued, should attract closer scrutiny because large-value restricted procurement can create greater corruption and value-for-money risks if justification and oversight are weak.
The CSOs are consequently calling for more open and competitive procurement, stronger compliance mechanisms and full integration of the Ghana Electronic Procurement System with the Ghana Integrated Financial Management Information System. Such integration, they argue, could strengthen real-time controls by linking procurement decisions more closely with expenditure authorisation and financial management.
Technology alone, however, will not solve the problem. The group wants the government to provide training, reliable internet connectivity and logistical support so that public institutions can use electronic procurement systems effectively rather than maintaining digital platforms that are poorly implemented in practice.
Transparency and citizen oversight also featured strongly in the proposals. The CSOs called for the timely publication of information on budget execution, procurement, public investment and audits in formats that are accessible and understandable to citizens.
Mr Nyankah cited previous monitoring exercises to demonstrate the difficulty civil society groups can face in obtaining even basic documentation on government-funded projects. In one exercise involving about 37 projects, he said requests for information yielded only one contract, despite some of the projects falling under the Office of the President.
“Among, I think, about 37 projects that we were monitoring, it was only one contract that came in. Even with the high powers at the Office of the President, it was only one contract,” he said. The experience, according to the CSOs, illustrates how limited access to procurement and project information can weaken independent monitoring.
Those concerns have become more significant as government scales up infrastructure spending under the Big Push programme. The group argues that citizens and civil society organisations must be able to track procurement, project costs, contractors, implementation timelines and expenditure if the programme is to command confidence and deliver value for money.
“Access to information is something that is key. So, as much as possible, government and its agencies should ensure that they provide adequate information to the citizens so that we can also monitor whatever the government is doing,” Mr Nyankah said.
The CSOs also called for stronger coordination among anti-corruption, investigative, prosecutorial and audit institutions. Clearer institutional mandates and better information-sharing could reduce fragmentation, prevent duplication and improve the speed with which corruption-related cases move from investigation to sanction.
For the Big Push programme specifically, the group wants stronger public investment management systems covering project appraisal, selection, monitoring and value-for-money assessment. The concern is that ambitious infrastructure spending can create fiscal and governance risks if projects are selected without adequate appraisal or implemented without sufficient public scrutiny.
Taken together, the recommendations place governance at the centre of the 2027 fiscal debate. For the CSOs, public expenditure should not be assessed solely by the size of budget allocations, but also by the quality of the institutions responsible for ensuring that those resources are properly contracted, spent and accounted for.
Their message to government is that the 2027 Budget should do more than fund projects and programmes. It should strengthen the accountability systems that determine whether public resources are protected, whether corruption risks are reduced and whether expenditure ultimately translates into measurable outcomes for citizens.
