Local Insights: Ghana offers a stable and attractive environment for business

With the government planning to allocate up to $10 billion USD for its ‘Big Push’ initiative over the coming years, Ghana offers significant growth potential and opportunities for local and international investors across key sectors, say Marian Ekua Hayfron-Benjamin and Sally Hayfron-Benjamin Boaten of HB&O Legal. 

The ‘Big Push’ aims to bridge Ghana’s critical infrastructure deficit and stimulate long-term economic growth through large-scale infrastructure investment, offering opportunities for public-private partnerships and long-term development contracts. Funded through petroleum revenues and mineral royalties, it focuses on roads and transport, energy and power, digital infrastructure, and urban and rural development, while encouraging investors to explore opportunities across these key sectors. 

Accra-based HB&O Legal is ideally placed to assist clients investing in Ghana, with high-level expertise and significant experience among its founders and senior staff. 

Ekua, HB&O Legal’s Senior Partner, was called to the Ghanaian Bar in 1992 (after being called to the Trinidad & Tobago Bar in 1986), and is approaching forty years of legal practice. She has advised on numerous investments and project finance transactions and other agreements in the banking, energy, and mining sectors. 

Sally, HB&O Legal’s Managing Partner, along with fellow partner Kwaku Osei Asare, and consultant Angela Naa Dedei Hedo all have more than 15 years of experience and have worked on several major transactions and key court cases in Ghana. 

“Our team is hard-working, business-oriented and original with the expertise, commitment, and passion to deliver the best service to our clients,” say Ekua and Sally. “At the centre of our teamwork is the ensuring of value, quality, timeliness and cost-effectiveness. We are ‘client centric’, because our clients are at the heart of our operations - they always come first and we provide advice tailored to each client’s commercial priorities and risk tolerance. Whilst maintaining strict legal compliance, we focus on achieving commercially practical outcomes for our clients.”

The Ghanaian legal and business landscape has evolved in many ways in recent years, note Ekua and Sally, from the digital transformation of its courts and a long-term programme of reforms, digitisation, and automation aimed at improving land management in Ghana (the Land Administration Project), to Bank of Ghana reforms relating to virtual assets, cryptocurrency trading, and digital credit, to several fiscal reforms aimed at easing the tax burden on individuals and businesses while promoting economic activity, and the introduction Ghana’s debt restructuring programme to address unstable public debt levels and restore macroeconomic stability under an IMF-supported reform programme. There have also been mining and resource law changes, with reforms underway that signal a shift in natural resource governance and optimising the national benefit of Ghana’s resource riches. 

“HB&O Legal regularly advises both local and international clients on Ghanaian legal and regulatory requirements,” say Ekua and Sally, noting their firm facilitates market entry for businesses, securing all relevant permits and authorisations, assists clients to manage regulatory and compliance risks, regularly structures cross-border investments and joint ventures, and leverages HB&O’s local legal insights to represent clients before the courts or other quasi-judicial bodies. “Combining legal expertise, regulatory knowledge, and local market insight, we are able to navigate legal challenges, manage risks, and harness commercial opportunities. This support is critical to achieving sustainable and compliant business success in Ghana.”

Ghana offers a stable and attractive environment for business, add Ekua and Sally, with its long-standing tradition of peaceful democratic transitions providing political stability and investor confidence, and a robust legal and judicial framework that supports contract enforcement, property rights, and dispute resolution. 

For more information on HB&O Legal, visit the firm's website.