Ghana should welcome the economy’s strong growth performance, but it should not become complacent about what is driving that growth. An economy can expand rapidly while failing to create enough decent jobs, strengthen domestic productive capacity or reduce its dependence on imports.

That is the danger posed by Ghana’s increasingly unbalanced growth pattern, in which Information and Communication Technology (ICT), together with transport and storage, is expanding much more vigorously than traditional employment-intensive sectors such as manufacturing, agriculture and hospitality, while fishing is actually contracting.

There is nothing inherently wrong with ICT or transport and storage growing rapidly. Indeed, a modern economy needs a dynamic digital sector and efficient logistics infrastructure. The problem arises when these sectors account for a disproportionately large share of incremental economic activity while sectors capable of absorbing large numbers of workers and producing goods for domestic and international markets lag behind.

Growth in ICT cannot substitute for growth in factories, farms and fisheries. Digital services can create highly productive and well-paid employment, but they cannot, on their own, absorb the millions of Ghanaians entering the labour market, particularly workers whose skills and educational backgrounds are more suited to productive activities outside the technology sector.

Manufacturing, agriculture and fishing occupy a particularly important position because their expansion can achieve several objectives simultaneously. They can create employment, deepen domestic value chains, reduce imports and generate export earnings. A Ghanaian economy that produces more of its own food, clothing, processed agricultural products, manufactured goods and fish is not merely growing—it is becoming more economically resilient.

This is why the current growth composition should be treated as a policy warning. If Ghana continues to import large quantities of manufactured goods, food products and other basic necessities while celebrating headline GDP growth, the country risks experiencing an expansion in economic activity without a corresponding transformation in its productive structure. Such growth can also perpetuate pressure on foreign exchange, particularly when increased domestic incomes translate into higher demand for imported goods.

The answer is not to restrain ICT, transport or storage. Rather, government must deliberately create conditions under which manufacturing, agriculture and fishing become more profitable and investible. This requires reliable and competitively priced electricity, efficient ports and roads, affordable long-term finance, predictable taxation, effective irrigation, modern extension services, fisheries management, industrial infrastructure and policies that encourage local value addition.

Government incentives must also be disciplined. Protection that merely keeps inefficient businesses alive will ultimately burden consumers. Support should instead be linked to measurable improvements in productivity, domestic sourcing, employment, value addition and export performance.

But government cannot do this alone. The private sector must respond positively to the incentives and opportunities created by sound policy.Ghanaian businesses must be prepared to invest in machinery, technology, skills, processing capacity and larger-scale production rather than concentrate disproportionately on trading and short-term financial opportunities.

The objective should therefore be clear: ICT and logistics should support Ghana’s productive transformation, not become substitutes for it. A truly sustainable growth strategy is one in which technology makes farms more productive, logistics makes factories more competitive and finance enables enterprises to scale.

Ghana needs strong growth but it needs growth that puts more people to work, produces more of what the country consumes and sells more of what it produces to the rest of the world. That is the growth that can transform the economy rather than merely enlarge it.