Every three hours in Ghana, another life ends on the road.
Not in a war zone. Not in a hospital ward battling disease. But on highways, feeder roads and city streets that millions of Ghanaians use daily in pursuit of work, school and survival.
By the time the sun sets each day, an average of eight families have received the kind of news that permanently rearranges lives — a father will not return home, a mother will never rise again, a child’s future has been erased.
Provisional figures from the National Road Safety Authority (NRSA) show that 2,949 people were killed on Ghana’s roads in 2025, the highest annual death toll in 35 years.
In the same year, 14,743 crashes were recorded nationwide, leaving 16,714 people injured and 24,938 vehicles wrecked, mangled or written off.
These are not just statistics. They represent a slow-moving national disaster, unfolding daily and largely unnoticed until it strikes a familiar name, a neighbour, a colleague or a relative.
A crisis measured in time, not numbers
When broken down, the scale of the tragedy becomes harder to ignore.
In 2025, Ghana recorded one road crash every 36 minutes, one injury every 31 minutes, and one death roughly every three hours.
Every 21 minutes, another vehicle became part of the wreckage.
Unlike disasters that shock the nation in a single moment, road crashes kill quietly and consistently.
There is no siren that announces a national emergency, yet the numbers tell a story of relentless loss.
Compared to 2024, road deaths rose by 18.2 per cent, while crashes, injuries and vehicles involved all increased.
Roads, by every measurable indicator, are becoming more dangerous, not safer.
When the breadwinner dies, poverty follows
The human cost is most painfully felt in households where the deceased was the main source of income.
NRSA data show that four out of every five people killed were men, reflecting their dominance in driving, riding motorcycles, and commercial transport work.
In many Ghanaian homes, the death of a man in his productive years is not just a personal tragedy — it is an economic collapse. Rent goes unpaid.
Children are withdrawn from school. Medical bills pile up. Funeral costs alone can wipe out years of savings.
Widows are often forced into low-capital trading, selling foodstuffs or household items just to survive.
In rural areas, extended families absorb the shock, stretching already limited resources thinner.
For some children, the road crash that killed a parent marks the beginning of lifelong disadvantage.
Even more disturbing is the number of children who never got the chance to grow up.
In 2025, 328 children under 18 were killed, meaning that for every seven adults who died on the road, one child also lost his or her life.
These were schoolchildren knocked down, teenage passengers in commercial vehicles, and young motorcycle riders navigating roads never designed for their safety.
The living dead: When survival means disability
Death is not the only devastating outcome.
For every life lost, several others are permanently altered.
The 16,714 injuries recorded in 2025 include thousands of cases that resulted in disability — spinal injuries, amputations, brain trauma and crushed limbs.
Across Ghana, able-bodied workers have become dependants overnight.
Drivers who can no longer sit. Artisans who cannot lift tools. Traders who cannot speak clearly again.
For their families, survival now means caregiving, hospital visits, physiotherapy and long-term medication — often without health insurance coverage or state support.
Disability from road crashes quietly feeds unemployment and poverty, reducing household productivity while increasing dependency.
It is a hidden social cost rarely captured in national budgets.
Hospitals at breaking point
Emergency units and trauma centres are feeling the strain.
Road crash victims consume a disproportionate share of emergency care resources — operating theatres, blood supplies, orthopaedic beds and intensive care units.
Doctors and nurses report that trauma cases routinely crowd out other medical needs.
The financial burden on the healthcare system is immense. Treating a single severe crash victim can cost the state tens of thousands of cedis, yet these expenses are repeated daily, year after year.
A national economic drain
Since 1991, 63,599 people have died on Ghana’s roads.
That is an entire city erased — workers, parents, innovators and taxpayers lost not to natural disasters or epidemics, but to preventable road crashes.
On a continental scale, Ghana’s crisis reflects a broader African failure.
Africa accounts for nearly 25% of global road traffic deaths, despite having just three per cent of the world’s vehicles.
The imbalance exposes weak enforcement, poor road design, inadequate trauma care and underinvestment in prevention.
Where the roads kill most
The data also reveal troubling regional patterns. Ashanti recorded the highest fatalities with 692 deaths, followed by the Eastern Region with 649 deaths, while Greater Accra recorded 420 deaths despite having more crashes.
In the Eastern Region, nearly three times more people die per 100 crashes than in Greater Accra — a sign of poor road conditions, delayed emergency response or higher-impact collisions.
Motorcycles are emerging as a major threat. Crashes involving motorcycles rose by 19.4% in 2025, fuelling fears that without strict regulation, expanded commercial motorcycle use could worsen an already deadly situation.
A system struggling to cope
According to the NRSA’s Director of Research, Monitoring and Evaluation, resource constraints severely limited road safety campaigns in the previous year, forcing some regional offices to shut down operations entirely.
Public education stalled, enforcement weakened and prevention efforts faded — just as crashes surged.
His warning is stark: without sustained funding, enforcement and political urgency, the numbers will rise again.
More than an accident
Ghana’s road safety crisis is no longer about careless drivers alone.
It is about policy choices, enforcement failures, infrastructure gaps and a national tolerance for preventable death.
Every crash report tells a story of a family altered forever.
Every statistic hides a funeral, a hospital bed, a child forced into adulthood too soon.
Until road deaths are treated with the urgency of a national emergency, Ghana’s roads will continue to claim lives — one crash, one family, one shattered future at a time.
