The Development Paradox

The Volta Region resembles a man sitting on a goldmine yet begging for coins. Blessed with fertile soils that could feed the nation, breathtaking landscapes that could rival any tourist destination on the continent, strategic borders that position it as a natural gateway for regional trade, and voices that could tell compelling stories of Ghana’s heritage to the world, the region remains paradoxically trapped in a cycle of underdevelopment that defies both logic and geography.

Walk through the verdant valleys of Hohoe, stand before the majestic Wli Falls, or observe the bustling yet informal cross-border activities along the Togo frontier, and one question becomes inescapable: How does a region with such obvious comparative advantages remain on the periphery of Ghana’s development narrative?

The answer lies not in the absence of potential, but in our collective inability to mobilize these assets through coherent strategy. For too long, development conversations about the Volta Region have been stuck in the disgusting discourse of political loyalty and reward—a framework that reduces citizens to voting blocs rather than recognizing them as custodians of untapped economic powerhouses. This transactional approach to regional development has created a dangerous precedent: that progress should follow partisan calculations rather than strategic opportunity.

But geography doesn’t vote, and potential doesn’t belong to any political party. The fertile lands of the Volta Region don’t care about electoral mathematics when they could be enhancing food security for Ghana. The region’s tourism assets don’t discriminate based on political affiliation when they could be generating foreign exchange and employment. The voices and stories that could connect the region to the world don’t wait for electoral cycles when they could be building bridges of understanding and economic opportunity. The cross-border trade opportunities don’t pause for political seasons when they could be creating legitimate economic corridors that benefit communities on both sides of artificial colonial boundaries.

The Development Trap

Before examining specific sectoral opportunities, it is essential to understand the systemic barriers that constrain development across all economic activities in the Volta Region. Infrastructure deficits represent the most visible constraint: inadequate road networks isolate rural communities from markets, unreliable electricity supply hampers processing activities, and limited access to clean water affects both agricultural productivity and tourism hospitality standards. Financial exclusion compounds these challenges, with limited banking services and microfinance options restricting smallholder farmers’ access to credit for improved inputs and equipment. The region also suffers from institutional fragmentation, where development initiatives operate in silos without coordination between government agencies, traditional authorities, and private sector actors. Human capital development lags behind national averages, with limited technical and vocational training opportunities leaving young people unprepared for emerging economic opportunities in tourism, agro-processing, and cross-border trade. Perhaps most critically, the region lacks a unified development vision that leverages its comparative advantages systematically, resulting in piecemeal interventions that fail to create the multiplicative effects necessary for sustained economic transformation. These interconnected challenges form the backdrop against which the following sectoral analysis must be understood.

The Leadership Factor

“Leadership is cause, everything else is effect.” The Volta Region’s current Regional Minister represents a fundamental shift in governance approach—bringing energy, vision, and collaborative leadership rarely witnessed in the region’s recent political history. This new leadership approach represents a fundamental departure from traditional governance models. By actively building bridges across the region and ensuring everyone has a voice in the development process, the early signs are encouraging: traditional authorities have extended their goodwill, departmental heads and institutional stakeholders are showing unprecedented cooperation, and investors appear ready to collaborate on meaningful initiatives. The Minister’s commitment to inclusive governance has created an environment where dialogue replaces division, where strategic thinking supersedes political calculations, and where the region’s diverse stakeholders find common ground in their shared vision for transformation. This collaborative foundation provides the bedrock upon which sustainable development can finally take root. The question now is whether this goodwill and collaborative momentum can be channeled into a development paradigm that finally unlocks what the Volta Region has always possessed but never fully utilized: the foundation for sustainable economic transformation built on agriculture, tourism, and cross-border trade.
But goodwill alone will not unlock the Volta Region’s potential.

Volta Region Development Framework

The Volta Region urgently requires a dynamic development framework. One that recognizes the interconnections between Tourism, Agriculture, Communication and Trade (TACT) and leverages them systematically. Agricultural development creates the products that can supply border markets and tourism facilities. Tourism development generates demand for agricultural products and provides markets for cross-border trade. Communication amplifies these opportunities by connecting farmers to markets, promoting the region’s attractions to potential visitors, and facilitating the networks that drive cross-border commerce. Trade enables the commercial networks that can distribute agricultural products, attract tourism investment, and spread information about regional opportunities.

Tourism: The Untapped Goldmine

The Volta Region in Ghana is often cited as the most beautiful in all of Ghana. It is home to Wli waterfalls, the highest in West Africa; Lake Volta, the world’s largest man-made lake at 8,502 km² which combines hydroelectric power with fishing communities, island adventures, and eco-tourism to offer tourism experiences that few destinations on the continent can match; and an incredibly scenic landscape throughout. This is no tourism board hyperbole—it is geographic reality.
Yet despite these natural endowments, the Volta Region captures only a small fraction of Ghana’s tourism revenue. While the Ashanti and Greater Accra regions benefit from well-developed tourism infrastructure and international marketing, the Volta Region remains largely off the tourist map. The most easterly region of Ghana, bordering on Togo, the Volta Region is an area of extraordinary scenic beauty. The rolling hills and valleys, rocky outcrops overlooking Lake Volta, and lagoons, rivers and waterfall make for one of nature’s most attractive gift to Ghana.

The region’s tourism appeal reaches far beyond its natural wonders. Its ethnic diversity—encompassing the Ewe, Guan, and Akan peoples—creates vast possibilities for cultural tourism. Traditional festivals, craft villages, and historical sites could anchor a thriving cultural tourism sector. Wli Waterfalls is one of the most visited tourist destinations in Ghana, offering a range of activities for visitors. Adventure seekers can explore hiking and walking trails, with a brief half-hour trek to the Lower Falls and a more challenging 3-hour hike to reach the Upper Falls.
The economic impact of developing this sector would be transformative.

Tourism is labor-intensive, creating jobs across skill levels—from tour guides and hospitality workers to craft producers and transport operators. It generates foreign exchange, stimulates local businesses, and creates markets for agricultural products. Most importantly, it provides sustainable income opportunities for rural communities that have few alternatives to subsistence agriculture.

Agriculture: The Sleeping Giant

The Region cultivates industrial and food crops such as cereals, legumes, vegetables, oil trees, root and tubers, pulses and plantation crops. Yet for all this diversity, the Volta Region remains a net importer of food products that it could easily produce in abundance. Drive through the fertile valleys of Ho or Hohoe and the irony becomes stark: communities that sit on some of Ghana’s most productive agricultural land still struggle with food security.

The numbers tell a sobering story. Ghana’s Agricultural Output: Cocoa production from the Volta region reached 6,421.750 metric tons in 2017. While respectable, this figure represents a fraction of the region’s potential when compared to other cocoa-producing regions with similar ecological conditions. More troubling is the region’s underperformance in food crop production. The primary carbohydrate crops comprise maize, cassava, plantain, yam, cocoyam, rice, sorghum and millet covering 3.40Mha or approximately 43% of total cultivated land. Yet smallholder farmers in the Volta Region remain stuck in survival farming, growing mainly to feed their families instead of selling to broader markets.

The tragedy of missed opportunities finds its most striking example in the Aveyime Rice Project located in the Central Tongu District of the Volta Region. Originally operated by Prairie Volta Limited, this venture was conceived to demonstrate the region’s agricultural potential on a commercial scale. Initially projected as a game-changing agricultural enterprise, preliminary assessments suggested that at maximum output, the initiative could satisfy Ghana’s entire rice demand while establishing a benchmark for rice cultivation across West Africa. The nation stood to retain over $600 million currently spent on rice import annually.

The project demonstrated early promise with over 100 acres of rice fields planted with jasmine rice, an additional 200-plus acres prepared for cultivation, and successful testing of 16 different rice varieties to identify optimal strains for local conditions. This varietal testing phase proved the region’s ability to generate premium rice capable of rivalling imported alternatives.

However, the project’s trajectory reflects the broader challenges facing the Volta Region development: after Prairie Volta Limited’s initial management, the project has undergone at least three ownership changes, with Ghanaian investor, Chris Kpodo’s Chrispod Farms Limited taking over in late 2023, yet as of 2024, the project remains largely dormant despite ambitious plans to cultivate 10,000 hectares annually.
The Aveyime story embodies the broader agricultural paradox of the Volta Region: immense potential constrained by systematic challenges. The root of this agricultural paradox lies not in the soil—which remains fertile—but in the systematic neglect of agricultural infrastructure, extension services, and market linkages. Farmers in communities like Jasikan, Kadjebi, and Nkwanta possess generational knowledge about crop cultivation but lack access to improved seeds, modern farming techniques, and reliable markets for their produce. The result is a vicious cycle: low productivity leads to low incomes, which prevents investment in improved farming methods, which perpetuates low productivity.

Consider the potential: the Volta Region’s climate supports year-round cultivation of vegetables, root crops, and cereals. Its proximity to major urban centers like Accra and Kumasi provides ready markets for fresh produce. Its strategic location along the Ghana-Togo border opens opportunities for export agriculture. Yet these advantages remain largely unexploited because the region lacks the agricultural infrastructure—irrigation systems, storage facilities, processing centers, and feeder roads—that would transform subsistence farming into commercial agriculture.

Communication: The Missing Bridge

In the digital age, sustainable development requires robust communication infrastructure—both digital connectivity and physical transport networks—that connects, coordinates, and integrates all sectors of the economy. The Volta Region’s development challenges are fundamentally about the ability to communicate effectively across tourism, agriculture, and cross-border trade through multiple channels.
The communication deficit represents perhaps the most overlooked barrier to the region’s development potential.

While the Volta region has 63 telecommunications sites under the government’s rural connectivity initiative and benefits from road networks connecting major towns, this infrastructure remains insufficient to serve vast rural communities and support economic transformation. Poor road conditions in remote areas compound digital connectivity gaps, creating dual barriers to effective communication.
Agricultural communication challenges are particularly acute.

Farmers in remote communities like Jasikan, Kadjebi, and Nkwanta face both information isolation and physical isolation—lacking access to real-time market prices, weather forecasts, and modern farming techniques while also struggling with poor road access to markets. When farmers in Hohoe harvest produce, they cannot efficiently connect with buyers in Accra or tourism facilities that could provide steady markets due to both inadequate telecommunications and challenging transport logistics. This dual communication barrier perpetuates subsistence farming and prevents agricultural commercialization.
Tourism faces even greater communication challenges across both digital and physical dimensions. Despite digital connectivity improvements in rural Ghana, the Volta Region’s tourism assets remain largely invisible to potential visitors through digital channels.

Simultaneously, poor road conditions and inadequate transport infrastructure make many attractions difficult to access, even when tourists are aware of them. The region’s landscapes, cultural festivals, and adventure opportunities are poorly documented and inadequately promoted digitally, while physical access remains challenging for many sites.

Trade across the border suffers from inadequate formal communication systems in both digital and physical infrastructure. While informal networks exist, the formal sector lacks digital infrastructure for legitimate cross-border commerce and efficient border crossing facilities. Electronic payment systems, digital customs processing, and real-time trade information remain largely unavailable, while border roads and crossing infrastructure often create bottlenecks that impede legitimate trade flows.

The communication gap encompasses telecommunications, transport, and institutional coordination leaving many rural Volta communities isolated from digital and economic networks. Government agencies, traditional authorities, and private sector actors operate without effective coordination mechanisms. When tourism initiatives develop, farmers remain unaware of supply opportunities. When agricultural services offer new techniques, tourism operators miss potential agro-tourism partnerships. These coordination failures create missed synergies that could drive integrated development.

The region’s strategic advantages—proximity to Togo, tourism assets, and agricultural potential—demand sophisticated communication systems encompassing digital trade facilitation, tourism marketing, supply chain coordination, and efficient physical connectivity that enables the movement of people, goods, and services across the TACT framework.

The economic consequences are severe: agricultural products spoil due to market disconnection, tourism potential remains untapped because of information and access barriers, and cross-border trade stays informal due to inadequate communication channels. These losses compound across sectors, creating a cycle of missed opportunities and fragmented development.

The solution requires expanding telecommunications infrastructure, improving road networks and transport systems, establishing community information centers, strengthening local media capacity, and creating institutional coordination mechanisms.

Effective communication systems would enable each sector to serve its primary stakeholders while facilitating the cross-sector integration that makes TACT work. When farmers can communicate directly with consumers and buyers about product availability and quality, when tourism operators can reach potential visitors and coordinate with existing tourists, and when traders can maintain reliable contact with suppliers and customers across borders, each sector strengthens its core functions. More importantly, when these communication networks intersect—allowing farmers to connect with tourism facilities, tourism operators to coordinate with traders, and all sectors to share market intelligence—the multiplicative effects of integrated development become possible.

Trade: Cross-border Strategic Advantage

The Volta Region’s location along the Ghana-Togo border represents one of its greatest underutilized assets. In 2019, Togo’s trade flows with Ghana reached USD 197 million, representing 7% of its total exports and imports. Total trade volumes are even greater, counting the informal flow of goods that cross the border. The main crossing point at Aflao-Lomé is one of the busiest borders in West Africa, facilitating both formal and informal trade between the two neighbouring countries.

Historical data from 1996 indicates the substantial volume of cross-border commerce, with an annual average of 24,876,651 kilograms (54,843,628 pounds) of goods passing through border crossing. This figure likely represents only the formally recorded trade, as small-scale cross-border trade in the region is known to be extensive, with academic estimates suggesting informal trade volumes sometimes exceed formal trade flows for certain commodities.

The challenge is not the volume of trade but its character. Much of the cross-border economic activity remains informal, unregulated, and therefore unable to contribute meaningfully to regional development. In 2022, a JoyNews exposé revealed how certain customs officers facilitated the smuggling of thousands of gallons of vegetable cooking oil from Togo and Côte d’Ivoire, resulting in losses of over GH₵300 million. This represents not just lost revenue but lost opportunities for legitimate businesses and formal employment.
The solution lies not in restricting cross-border trade but in formalizing and facilitating it. Border markets, simplified customs procedures, and investment in border infrastructure could transform the Volta Region into a legitimate trade hub. Aflao, the entry point between Ghana and Togo, has experienced the highest increase in population in the region (5.2%) over the past 30 years. This growth reflects the economic opportunities that cross-border trade creates, but it also highlights the need for planned development that maximizes these opportunities while minimizing associated problems.

The Development Imperative

The Volta Region’s development trajectory must align with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to ensure that growth is inclusive, environmentally sustainable, and economically viable. Critical areas requiring immediate attention include SDG 1 (No Poverty) and SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth), where the region’s reliance on subsistence agriculture and informal cross-border trade perpetuates income insecurity for thousands of households.

SDG 2 (Zero Hunger) presents both challenge and opportunity: while the region possesses fertile soils capable of enhancing food security, current agricultural practices fail to maximize productivity or ensure consistent food access for vulnerable populations.

SDG 9 (Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure) remains severely underdeveloped, with inadequate transport networks, limited digital connectivity, and minimal processing facilities constraining economic diversification.

The region’s tourism potential directly connects to SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities) and SDG 15 (Life on Land), requiring development approaches that preserve ecological integrity while creating economic opportunities.

Most importantly, achieving SDG 17 (Partnerships for the Goals) demands the kind of integrated development strategy outlined in the TACT framework, where traditional authorities, government institutions, private sector actors, and communities collaborate systematically to transform the region’s comparative advantages into sustained prosperity for its people.

The Path Forward

The region’s people deserve better than the perpetual cycle of political promises and unfulfilled potential. They deserve leadership that recognizes that nature’s most attractive gift to Ghana should translate into tangible improvements in their daily lives. The foundation exists. The potential is evident. What remains is the vision and determination to build upon both.
The challenge is not identifying what needs to be done—that is evident from the analysis above. The challenge is demonstrating the political will to move beyond the old paradigm of regional development based on political loyalty to a new paradigm based on economic potential.

The convergence of these four sectors—tourism, agriculture, communication, and trade—presents leadership of the region with an unprecedented opportunity to demonstrate that regional development can be driven by strategic thinking rather than political calculations. The early signs of cooperation from traditional authorities, departmental heads, and institutional stakeholders for the Regional Minister particularly create the foundation for transformative action.

The Volta Region has waited long enough for someone to recognize what geography and nature have already provided. The question now is whether its new leadership will rise to meet this historic moment.