Requests for unofficial payments by public officials in Ghana rose sharply during the second half of 2025, with almost seven in 10 citizens who encountered bribery saying they had been asked to pay extra money to access public services.
New data from the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) also shows that the proportion of people who admitted paying bribes increased from 14.3% in the first half of 2025 to 18% between July and December.
That means about one in six Ghanaians paid a bribe to a public official during the final six months of the year.
The findings were presented at a Governance Series event organised by Three Reports and the GSS on Tuesday, 4 August 2026. Government Statistician Dr Alhassan Iddrisu said governance conditions had worsened in the second half of 2025, even though the country’s overall performance for the full year improved compared with 2024.
“The most recent six months, which is July to December 2025, got harder compared to the previous six months, which is January to June 2025,” he said.
Dr Iddrisu said the rise in the number of people reporting that they had paid bribes was significant.
“Over the last six months of 2025, the share who paid a bribe rose from 14.3% in the first half of 2025 to 18% in the second half of 2025. That is about one in six paid a bribe to a public official.”
The increase was even greater among citizens who said public officials had demanded unofficial payments. That figure rose from 51% during the first six months of 2025 to 69% between July and December.
“So the pressure sits at the counter. The problem now is less what citizens offer and more of what officials would ask,” he stated.
Despite the deterioration recorded in the latter half of the year, Dr Iddrisu said the annual results still pointed to an improvement over 2024.
“The full year, which is 2025, got better compared to 2024. Both of these stories are true, and that’s the beauty of the six-monthly survey that we do, to be able to look at trends within waves and even compare between years,” he explained.
The Governance Survey tracks the same nationally representative households in all 16 regions of Ghana. This allows the GSS to measure changes in governance indicators over time without attributing differences to changes in the households selected for each survey.
The latest results are based on interviews with household heads carried out during the first quarter of 2026. The interviews recorded citizens’ experiences when seeking public services from July to December 2025.
The figures therefore provide a comparison between the first and second six-month periods of 2025, while also allowing the GSS to assess the year’s overall performance against the data recorded in 2024.
