Accra, May 30, 2025 – A new governance survey by the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) has found that so-called “gift giving” is a major channel for bribery in Ghana’s public sector, with nearly one in six adults who dealt with a public official in 2024 admitting they gave a gift or money as a form of bribe to access services.
The findings are contained in the first wave of GSS’s Governance Series, a nationwide survey designed to track citizens’ direct experiences with public institutions and to monitor progress on global anti-corruption targets under the Sustainable Development Goals.
According to the report, 55.7 percent of adults had contact with at least one public official in 2024. Of this group, 18.4 percent – nearly one in six – said they gave a gift to the official in order to obtain a service. The report explicitly classifies these gifts as a form of bribery, noting that the vast majority took the form of cash.
Money accounts for about 85 percent of all bribe payments, far outweighing non-cash items such as food, drinks or favours.
GSS defines bribery in this context as giving a gift, money or doing a favour in addition to an official fee, or in expectation of preferential treatment, in the 12 months before the survey.
The survey was conducted between 2 and 20 January 2025 using computer-assisted telephone interviews.
It covered 7,248 respondents drawn from 15,400 households nationwide, based on the 2021 Population and Housing Census.
The data show clear patterns about who pays bribes and under what circumstances.
Bribery is far more common among men than women. Men account for 68.3 percent of those who reported giving gifts or money as a bribe, compared to 31.7 percent for women.
Urban residents also bear a larger share of the burden: 64.3 percent of bribe-payers live in urban areas, against 35.7 percent in rural communities. GSS analysts link this to more frequent contact with state institutions in cities, where services such as licensing, policing, immigration and land administration are concentrated.
The report highlights a worrying pattern among vulnerable groups. Approximately 21.1 percent of respondents living with disabilities said they had given gifts as bribery to public officials, with particularly high rates among those with physical impairments and visual difficulties.
Regionally, Greater Accra and Ashanti recorded the highest incidences of gift-giving as bribery, while Savannah and North East reported the lowest.
GSS also ranks institutions by how often citizens say they had to give money or gifts in addition to official fees. The Police Service, especially its Motor Traffic and Transport Division (MTTD), tops the list.
An institutional breakdown of the Governance Series shows that 61 percent of respondents who dealt with the Police MTTD reported giving a bribe, followed by 46.7 percent for Police General Duties and 37.9 percent for the Criminal Investigations Department (CID).
Other institutions with high reported bribery rates include the Passport Office, Births and Deaths Registry, Lands Commission, the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA), the Electoral Commission and officials of metropolitan, municipal and district assemblies.
Teachers in public schools also appear in the top ten list of institutions whose officials most frequently received bribes.
In each of these cases, citizens typically described their payments as “gifts” or “something small” given to speed up processes, avoid sanctions or secure favourable treatment.
Despite the scale of bribery and gift-giving, resistance and reporting remain low.
Only about 9 percent of respondents who said a public official demanded money or a gift reported that they refused to pay.
Just 14 percent of those who did pay said they reported the incident to an anti-corruption agency such as the Office of the Special Prosecutor, the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ) or the police.
Yet, in the same survey, more than 70 percent of respondents said they believe Ghana’s current political system offers little or no space for ordinary citizens to influence decision-making, and many expressed concerns about transparency in public service delivery.
The contrast suggests that while Ghanaians are deeply worried about corruption, social norms, fear of retaliation and lack of confidence in complaints mechanisms discourage them from challenging bribery when they encounter it.
The GSS has been careful to stress that the study sets out to measure actual experiences of bribery, not just perceptions. The focus on “gifts” is deliberate: statisticians wanted to capture the everyday envelopes and favours that many Ghanaians no longer see as formal corruption, even though they clearly influence access to services.
In earlier comments on the broader corruption survey work, Government Statistician Prof Samuel Kobina Annim has described the normalisation of bribery as “frightening and worrying,” warning that the practice has “become part of us” and urging that the data should trigger a sustained national conversation about its ripple effects on inequality, service delivery and trust in institutions.
The Governance Series builds on the 2023 GSS study “Enhancers and Barriers to the Payment of Bribes,” which estimated that bribery and related forms of corruption cost Ghana around 5 percent of its Gross Domestic Product each year and documented how cultural expectations of reciprocity, the fear of victimisation and weak accountability systems drive both the demand for and the supply of bribes.
GSS says the new evidence is intended to give policymakers a clearer picture of where and how informal payments occur so that reforms can be targeted at the institutions, regions and population groups most affected.
The Service argues that the data should feed into sector-specific reforms in policing, transport regulation, immigration, land administration and local government, as well as public education campaigns that address the blurred line between “gift-giving” and bribery.
