Public officials demanded unofficial payments from nearly seven out of every 10 Ghanaians who encountered bribery situations in the second half of 2025, according to a new governance data report by the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS).
The report indicates that while Ghana’s overall governance performance improved in 2025 compared with the previous year, citizens’ everyday experiences with bribery worsened, with a sharp rise in cases where public officials allegedly requested extra payments to provide services.
The latest Governance Series report, released by the GSS, shows that the proportion of citizens who said public officials demanded unofficial payments increased significantly from 51% in the first half of 2025 to 69% between July and December 2025.
Presenting the findings at a Governance Series event organised by Three Reports and the GSS, the Government Statistician, Dr Alhassan Iddrisu, said the data pointed to a growing concern around demands for bribes by public officials.
He explained that the nature of bribery had shifted, with the burden increasingly moving from citizens offering payments to officials actively demanding them.
“So the pressure sits at the counter. The problem now is less what citizens offer and more of what officials would ask,” Dr Iddrisu said.
The survey further revealed that the percentage of Ghanaians who actually paid a bribe to access public services increased from 14.3% in the first half of 2025 to 18% in the second half of the year.
This means that approximately one in every six citizens who interacted with public services paid a bribe during the period under review.
Despite the worsening bribery experiences, Dr Iddrisu said the broader governance picture remained positive, with Ghana recording an improvement in overall governance indicators in 2025 compared with 2024.
He noted that the six-monthly survey provided a more detailed understanding of changing trends by capturing both short-term shifts and year-on-year comparisons.
“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 said.
Dr Iddrisu explained that the survey methodology involved tracking the same nationally representative households across all 16 regions, allowing the GSS to measure actual changes in citizens’ experiences over time.
He said this approach helped to distinguish genuine changes in governance experiences from variations that could arise when different groups of respondents are surveyed.
The latest findings are based on interviews conducted with household heads in the first quarter of 2026 and capture citizens’ experiences with governance and public services between July and December 2025.
The report forms part of the GSS’s broader effort to provide evidence-based data to support policy decisions, strengthen accountability and improve public sector performance.
