A total of roughly GHC5 billion in bribes was paid to public officials in 2021, a survey by the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) has shown.
According to the survey, the average bribe paid is GHC348 or roughly US$44, based on the 2021 spot exchange rate.
The report carrying these findings from a maiden national survey was titled Corruption in Ghana – People’s Experiences and Views. It also offered breakdowns of how susceptible individual areas of the public service were to bribe-taking and how prevalent bribery was by region, according to the survey respondents.
The survey found that the region with the highest prevalence of bribe-taking was Western North (53.4%) while it was least prevalent in Bono East (11.8%) and Bono (11.9%).
Respondents found the police, immigration and customs services most susceptible to taking bribes, mirroring other surveys such as the Corruption Perceptions Index.
“Given that roughly 17.4 million bribes were paid in Ghana in 2021, the average bribe size of GHC348 results in a total of approximately GHC5 billion paid in cash bribes to public officials in 2021,” the survey said.
To put the numbers into perspective, this corresponds to almost one-third (32.9%) of the 2021 budget of the Ministry of Education.
Size of bribes
The size of the average bribe paid in Ghana further differs greatly between urban and rural areas. At GHC404, the average bribe in urban areas is approximately 1.5 times larger than the GHC265 average in rural areas.
The share of small bribes (under GHC50) is larger in rural (47.3%) than in urban areas (31.7%), whereas the share of larger bribes (above GHC100) is higher in urban (47.8%) than in rural areas (35.2%). An interesting finding of the survey data is that not all bribe-payers are willing to pay the actual amount requested by the public official.
Roughly four out of every ten bribe-payers reported negotiating the value of a bribe paid, with men being 1.3 times more likely to negotiate the value of a cash bribe than women.
The Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ), in partnership with the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) and with support from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), conducted the first comprehensive, nationally representative population survey on corruption in Ghana.
The fieldwork involved a survey of 15,000 respondents across the country, covering all regions and both urban and rural areas.
The main objective was to collect evidence-based information on forms of corruption affecting the population of Ghana in order to determine the prevalence of corruption and its prevailing typologies.
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