In Ghana’s pursuit of economic transformation and inclusive growth, a parallel reality continues to unfold quietly but persistently. It is a reality in which opportunity is often negotiated through physical, institutional, and deeply attitudinal barriers. For thousands of persons living with disabilities, economic survival is not defined solely by skill or ambition, but by how accessible the systems of work, finance, and enterprise truly are.
In public discourse, disability is still frequently framed as a social welfare concern. Yet interviews with leading voices in the disability community reveal a more complex truth: exclusion from economic systems is not only a matter of social justice, but also a significant loss to national productivity, innovation, and fiscal growth.
For Richard Offei, entrepreneur, advocate, and former captain of Ghana’s national amputee football team, this reality is lived experience. A motor accident at age 18 resulted in the loss of his leg, abruptly altering a promising football career that had already begun to attract national recognition. What followed, he recalls, was not only physical rehabilitation but a deeper struggle against stigma and rejection.
“My family rejected me because I became one leg after the accident,” he said during an interview with The High Street Journal. “In Ghana, when somebody becomes disabled, society sees the person as useless.”
Offei’s story, however, is not one of limitation but reinvention. Drawing on his experience in sports and leadership, he has built a disability-centred enterprise ecosystem anchored by the Ghana Disability Development Foundation and affiliated structures. Central to this initiative is Agynkwa Company Limited, a beverage enterprise producing Rich Natural Fruit Beverages, certified by the Food and Drugs Authority, and positioned as both a commercial product and a social employment platform.
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According to documents shared with this publication, the initiative is designed to integrate persons with disabilities across production, marketing, branding, and distribution chains, with projections targeting employment for over 3,000 persons with disabilities nationwide. The model is intentionally structured to shift disability from dependency to productive participation.
Yet the path to building such an enterprise has been marked by structural resistance. Offei describes repeated encounters with financial exclusion, particularly within banking systems and credit institutions where access to capital remains a major barrier.
“You go to the bank and because you are disabled, the discrimination starts immediately,” he said. “You go to government offices and there are no disability friendly systems. Sometimes there are no lifts. You have to struggle just to climb stairs to register your business.”
He further referenced a 2023 engagement with the Ghana Enterprises Agency, where he and other disability entrepreneurs sought institutional support. He recalls dismissive remarks that suggested funding mechanisms were not intended for persons with disabilities, a moment he describes as emblematic of systemic exclusion.
“We asked ourselves, are we not part of the world?” he said. “Are we aliens?”
Despite these barriers, Offei’s enterprise vision continues to expand, supported in part by engagements with development actors, including recognition of supportive interventions from international partners such as the former country director of Ghana World Bank Mr Pierre Frank Laporte, which he credits as part of the ecosystem that helped strengthen advocacy for disability entrepreneurship.
His experience reflects a broader structural issue identified by disability rights advocate Yaw Ofori-Debra, a nationally and internationally recognised leader in disability governance. Ofori-Debra’s career spans over three decades of leadership across organisations including the Ghana Blind Union, the Ghana Federation of Disability Organisations, and global bodies such as the World Blind Union, where he currently serves as Second Vice President.
In December 2024, he was conferred with the Order of the Volta, one of Ghana’s highest national honours, in recognition of his decades of advocacy for inclusion, policy reform, and disability rights advancement.
For Ofori-Debra, the core challenge remains unchanged: accessibility is not only physical but deeply attitudinal.
“The biggest challenge is accessibility,” he said. “And I do not restrict it only to physical accessibility. The attitudinal barriers are even worse.”
He explains that although Ghana has established legal frameworks, including disability legislation and international conventions, implementation remains inconsistent. Institutional actors, he notes, often become the very obstacles they are mandated to eliminate.
“The legal frameworks are there,” he said. “But the people who are supposed to implement them are themselves the obstacles.”
The economic consequences of this exclusion are significant. Across Ghana, many persons living with disabilities who have completed tertiary education remain unemployed for years. Others are pushed into informal survival economies due to a lack of access to formal employment systems.
“Some have completed school for seven years, ten years, and still do not have hope of employment,” Ofori-Debra said. “Families become frustrated. Daily living becomes difficult because there is no source of income.”
Globally, institutions such as the World Bank and the International Labour Organisation have consistently warned that disability exclusion carries measurable economic costs, including reduced productivity, increased dependency ratios, and constrained labour market participation. In Ghana, advocates argue that these effects manifest in rising unemployment pressures, increased household dependency, and visible street begging among persons living with disabilities who are capable of productive work.
“When people who could work are excluded, they become dependent on families and social support,” Ofori-Debra said. “And many are forced onto the streets just to survive.”
Yet both interviewees converge on a central argument: persons living with disabilities are not passive recipients of aid but active holders of economic potential. Offei describes many as “powerful and intelligent people with strong business ideas,” whose exclusion represents a loss not only to themselves but to the national economy.
Ofori-Debra frames the solution in policy terms, calling for deliberate inclusion frameworks, including employment quotas, accessible infrastructure, and targeted investment in disability entrepreneurship.
“Persons with disabilities do not need charity,” he said. “They need opportunity.”
Offei’s vision is similarly grounded in structural transformation. For him, the issue is not sympathy but system redesign. He argues that Ghana’s economic architecture must evolve to reflect the realities of all citizens, including those whose mobility or sensory differences require adaptive systems rather than exclusionary ones.
As Ghana continues to pursue industrialisation, entrepreneurship development, and job creation, disability advocates caution that these goals cannot be fully realised without structural inclusion. The question is no longer whether persons living with disabilities can contribute to the economy, but whether the economy is designed to enable them to do so.
Until that question is answered decisively, the country will continue to lose not only individual potential, but measurable economic value. In that silence lies a hidden cost, one that is carried daily by those who continue to build, create, and persist within systems that were never designed with them in mind.
