Every night, many students in Ghana search for affordable places to sleep. Young workers squeeze into shared rooms, while National Service Personnel arriving in new communities often struggle to find accommodation they can afford.
Yet, on that same night, thousands of beds across Ghana remain untouched. New data from the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) shows that Ghana had an average of about 168,000 accommodation rooms available each night between November 2024 and February 2025 across hotels, guest houses, hostels and other lodging facilities.
This means that about 55% of hotels, guest rooms, and other lodging facilities are practically empty each night while students, young workers etc. struggle for a place to lay their heads for the night.
For policy and data analyst Alfred Appiah, the striking mismatch should make government rethink how it responds to Ghana’s accommodation and affordable housing pressures.
Rather than immediately spending huge sums to construct new affordable housing units, he argues that government should first explore how some of the country’s existing but underused accommodation capacity can be put to work.
Turn Empty Rooms into Affordable Homes
Alfred Appiah is calling for government to consider partnerships with owners of underused guest houses and budget hotels to convert some rooms into long-stay accommodation.
He believes that instead of waiting years for new buildings to be planned, financed and constructed, government could work with existing accommodation providers to make some of their unused rooms available to people who urgently need somewhere to live.
The potential beneficiaries, he names, are obviously students, National Service Personnel and young workers who often move to new towns and cities without the income to pay conventional hotel rates or expensive rents.
Ghana Already Has Rooms
The GSS data reveals that the country’s accommodation sector is not operating at full capacity. On average, only about 45% of available rooms were occupied, leaving more than half unused.
Yet the country continues to face intense pressure for affordable accommodation. This means Ghana could potentially have two seemingly contradictory problems at the same time. People without affordable places to stay and accommodation businesses with empty rooms.
The policy analyst’s proposal seeks to connect those two sides of the market. Instead of treating every accommodation problem as a construction problem, government could explore whether existing capacity can be repurposed first.
A Cheaper and Faster Alternative
He narrates that building affordable housing requires land acquisition, planning, financing, procurement, construction, utilities, and maintenance. These projects can take years before a single person moves into a completed unit.
However, he argues that partnering with existing accommodation providers could potentially shorten that timeline considerably.
A guest house with an average of 30 unused rooms does not need to be built from the ground up.
What may be missing is a mechanism that connects those unused rooms with people who need affordable long-term accommodation.
Government could potentially negotiate discounted long-stay rates with participating establishments, provide targeted support or incentives, and establish eligibility arrangements for students, NSS personnel and young workers.
