We’ve Not Spent GHS650bn- 24-Hour Economy Secretariat
The 24-Hour Economy and Accelerated Export Development (24H+) Secretariat has clarified that the GHS 650 billion cited by the Ranking Member of the Economy and Development Committee, Hon. Kojo Oppong Nkrumah, is not expenditure on the 24-Hour Economy.
According to the Secretariat, it is the total amount Parliament appropriated for all government programmes over the past two years.
In a statement responding to comments made in Parliament on July 14, 2026, the Secretariat said the question deserves a factual answer, and explained that the 24H+ Programme is Ghana’s blueprint for structural economic transformation for producing more of what we consume and exporting more of what we produce.
According to the Secretariat, almost all 24H+ projects are funded by private investors, both Ghanaian and foreign companies and cooperatives, as outlined in Section 18 of the 24-Hour Economy Authority Act, 2026 (Act 1164).
Public funds, it said, are used for project preparation, viability gap funding to make projects bankable, and seed funding for the Secretariat’s coordination work, with the expectation that the Authority will become self-financing after its first few years.
The Secretariat stated that the right measure of success for the programme is the investment it mobilises and the production, exports and jobs it generates.
The goal is to reduce unemployment to below 5 per cent by 2034, a 9.7 percentage point drop from the 14.7 per cent recorded as at September 2024.
On what the programme has delivered so far, the Secretariat said the initial phase was deliberately slow to ensure policies are in place, SMEs are ready, land titles are conflict-free, and reliable electricity is secured.
Between January and June 2025, nationwide consultations produced the full 24H+ Programme, which President John Mahama launched on July 2, 2025.
By December 2025, the Secretariat had developed 30 concrete projects for Phase One, and work is underway to make them bankable for sustainable private investment.
Parliament passed the 24-Hour Economy Authority Act, 2026, and the President assented to it on 19th February 2026, giving the programme the legal institution to implement projects through joint ventures.
The National Development Planning Commission’s 2025 Annual Progress Report also references the work of the 24-Hour Economy under flagship programmes in section 4.3.
As of May 2026, the Secretariat and its co-development partners had signed Joint Development Agreements worth about USD 5.5 billion within a project pipeline of USD 11.5 billion.
The programme targets 1.7 million decent jobs by the end of 2028, including direct, indirect and induced jobs. Four agreements signed in the past 90 days alone have combined targets of more than 160,000 direct jobs.
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