BORN TOO FAR AWAY?

Where you are born can literally shape who you become.

If you are born in an egalitarian society like Norway, you are likely to grow up in a system that deliberately tries to reduce inequality and provide relatively high, broadly distributed living standards.

If you are born in the United States, you are born into a capitalist system built around the idea that you can rise from the bottom to the top. They call it the American Dream. It does not mean the system is equal or that success is easy. It simply means that the possibility exists.

If you are born in North Korea, the system largely determines the opportunities available to you. If you are born in China, the state still plays a powerful role, but the economic system gives individuals considerably more room to determine the direction of their lives.

And then there are places like South Sudan or Palestine, where conflict and instability can make something as basic as planning your future extraordinarily difficult.

These are very different political and economic systems.

But there is another kind of inequality I think we should start talking about, particularly in countries like Ghana.

The inequality of distance.

Not simply the distance between one town and another, but the distance between where you are born and where opportunity is concentrated.

A government may technically provide schools, health facilities, roads and other public services across the country. But when the quality of those services is so far below what exists elsewhere, the formal existence of an opportunity does not necessarily mean that people have an equal opportunity to benefit from it.

And that creates an uncomfortable question:

Can people truly be said to have equal opportunities when the opportunities available to them depend heavily on where they happen to be born?

This is the question that brings me home to Northern Ghana

Ghana's population is projected at about 34.4 million in 2026. Young people aged 15–35 account for about 36.9% of the population, while roughly 41% live in rural areas.

For the purposes of this conversation, I am focusing on what I call the “true North”: Upper West, Upper East, Northern, Savannah and North East. Together, these five regions account for roughly one-fifth of Ghana's population.

I am particularly interested in these regions because I am part of them.

I come from the Upper West Region. I live and work in a rural area. I have had the opportunity to move around villages and communities that many Ghanaians in the southern parts of the country may never visit.

And I actually love living in rural areas.

There is something about being far away from what people normally describe as “civilization” that excites me.

But there is another description for many of these places that I dislike - “Deprived”.

And unfortunately, sometimes it is difficult to argue with the description.

One of the first things I noticed after moving around here was how empty many of the villages were.

Some communities seemed to be populated mainly by children and elderly people. If you found young adults, they were often nurses, teachers, and district assembly workers or people whose jobs had brought them there.

And I kept asking myself:

Why are these places empty?

My first answer was simple.

There is nothing here, and there is nothing to do here.

Then I started asking harder questions.

Why is there so much poverty?

Why are there teenage pregnancies?

Why do people move to Accra, Kumasi, Sunyani or Tamale whenever they get the opportunity?

The easy answer was always the same: there is nothing here.

But eventually I realized that answer was becoming too convenient.

Because when the question changed from what people were doing to what the state was supposed to be doing, the picture became different.

Where are the teachers?

There aren't enough people here.

But there are children here.

Even if there is only one child in a community, that child still deserves an education.

Where is the road?

There aren't enough people here.

But there are people living here.

Even if the population is small, those people still need to move.

This is where the argument becomes uncomfortable.

Does the size of a population determine how much of a Ghanaian you are entitled to be?

If 500 people live in a community instead of 50,000, should their lives automatically be worth less in terms of public investment?

I don't think so.

The Starting Line: Take education.

In some rural communities, the problem is not simply whether there is a school building.

Are there enough teachers? Are they qualified? How long do they stay? What resources do they have? What exposure do the students have?

And perhaps most importantly:

How are these children expected to compete?

At the end of their education, a child in a rural community will sit the same BECE or WASSCE examination as a child in Accra, Kumasi or another major city.

The examination is the same.

The university admission process is the same.

The job market is the same.

So why shouldn't the starting conditions also be reasonably comparable?

Healthcare presents a slightly different picture.

Ghana's CHPS concept has done a lot to bring basic healthcare closer to rural communities, and that is something worth acknowledging.

But the moment a patient develops a condition that requires more specialized care, distance begins to matter.

The quality of the referral system matters. The road matters. The availability of ambulances matters. The availability of doctors, nurses, laboratory services, medicines and other professionals matters.

It is 2026, Upper West and Upper East are neighboring regions, yet travelling between their capitals, Wa and Bolgatanga, can still feel like a journey that belongs to another era.

The road distance is only about 262–265 kilometers. That is not an extraordinary distance. The problem is what the journey can become because of the quality and reliability of the road and public transport.

And this is not simply an inconvenience.

Roads determine whether farmers can move their produce, whether students can reach schools, whether patients can reach hospitals and whether businesses can operate.

They also determine whether an investor will look at a community and say:

“I can build something here.”

I know the present government has a “Big Push” agenda intended to address some of these infrastructure challenges. But until those roads are actually completed and become reliable routes for the people who depend on them, the problem remains.

Who Do We Blame?

My initial frustration with this situation was directed at the NDC as a political party.

Northern Ghana has historically been one of the strongest areas of support for the NDC.

So I kept asking myself:

After all these years of political loyalty, why does the North still feel so far behind when we keep electing the same representatives, often simply because they are NDC candidates?

Why should a region that consistently contributes votes to a political party still have communities struggling for basic infrastructure?

Then my frustration shifted. It moved to the Akufo-Addo government, particularly as I watched economic decisions being made while ordinary people were struggling.

The National Cathedral became one of the things that particularly frustrated me.

The project was initially presented as a national religious and spiritual project, but the state eventually committed public funds to it.

And I remember asking myself:

How is this the priority?

How is this the priority when children in my district still struggle to receive the quality of education they deserve?

How is this the priority when a journey of roughly 260 kilometers between Wa and Bolgatanga can become such a difficult undertaking?

How is this the priority when many communities have virtually no industrial base capable of giving young people meaningful employment?

I was livid.

But eventually, my frustration moved again. This time, it moved from the people at the top to my own people. Because regardless of who is in power, we are the ones who keep electing them.

And that forced me to ask a much harder question:

Do we know that we can demand?

Do people in Northern Ghana understand that they can demand better from their leaders?

Do we understand that development is not a favour?

Do we understand that our elected representatives have a responsibility to represent our interests and hold government accountable?

I am not sure we do.

I am not trying to blame ordinary people for the poverty they experience. But when poor conditions are repeatedly accepted as inevitable, that acceptance can become politically convenient for the very people responsible for changing those conditions.

There is a historical reason this attitude may feel familiar. The colonial relationship between the Northern Territories and the southern Gold Coast was not simply an ordinary regional relationship.

Historical writings show that the colonial administration increasingly treated the North as a source of labor for the mines, cocoa farms and infrastructure of the South.

That history does not mean everything that happens in Northern Ghana today is the result of colonialism.

But history can leave institutional patterns behind.

In September 2026, The Fourth Estate reported on what it described as “SOCO ghost boreholes” in communities in the Yendi Municipality.

Projects were recorded on paper, but residents told investigators that the projects did not exist. People were still depending on hand-dug wells and muddy dams, sometimes sharing the same water sources with animals.

A project being recorded as completed is not the same thing as a community receiving development.

In 2026, I would have imagined that life in Northern Ghana would have improved substantially.

I would have imagined that the gap between the North and South would be closing much faster.

I would have imagined that being born in a village in Upper West would no longer put you several meters behind a child born in Accra before either of you has done anything wrong.

I grew up hearing the argument that the South has more natural resources, so naturally the South would receive more development.

But that argument cannot explain everything anymore.

Gold-bearing geological formations exist across several northern regions, including Upper East, Upper West, North East and Savannah.

More importantly, Ghana has chosen a system of government in which the state has accepted responsibility for pursuing balanced national development.

That brings me to the Constitution.

Article 36 of the 1992 Constitution says that the State shall take necessary action to maximize economic development and secure the welfare, freedom and happiness of people in Ghana.

But paragraph 2(d) is the part that interests me most.

It requires the State to pursue “even and balanced development of all regions and every part of each region of Ghana,” and specifically calls for improving conditions in rural areas and redressing the imbalance between rural and urban areas.

Article 36(6) goes further by stating that the State shall afford equality of economic opportunity to all citizens.

So perhaps our problem is that we have not used the constitutional language strongly enough.

Perhaps we have been asking for favors when we should have been demanding accountability.

I want Northerners to demand more from their MPs.

Not because MPs personally build every road, school or hospital, but because they represent us in Parliament. They make laws, participate in national budgeting and have a responsibility to scrutinize and hold government accountable.

So communities should be asking:

What have you done to raise the issue of this road?

What have you done about this school or hospital?

What have you done to raise the issue of youth unemployment, water and industrial development?

And the questions should go beyond the MP.

What has the District Assembly done?

What has the relevant Ministry done?

What has Parliament done?

What has the government promised?

And most importantly:

What has actually been delivered?

If the answer is nothing, we should not simply accept it.

We should organize.

We should petition.

We should use the media.

We should engage Parliament and the relevant state institutions.

We should use the constitutional framework available to us.

We should stop treating development as something politicians give us.

Development is not a favour. It is a responsibility of the state, and citizens should be able to demand it.

I understand that if you look at Ghana as a whole, the problems I am raising are not exclusive to Northern Ghana.

There are deprived communities in the South.

There are poor communities in Greater Accra.

There are children in the Central Region without adequate opportunities.

There are people in the Volta Region, Western Region, Oti and elsewhere who are also waiting for development.

This is therefore not an argument that Northerners deserve more than other Ghanaians.

It is an argument that:

Northerners deserve what other Ghanaians deserve.

And those of us who manage to get educated should not simply celebrate the fact that we escaped.

We should come back with ideas.

We should build businesses.

We should become industrialists.

We should create jobs.

We should build institutions.

We should improve our communities.

We should make it possible for the next generation to stay if they want to stay.

We cannot choose where we are born.

But we can choose what kind of country we build around the people who are born there.

Whether you are born far away from Accra, far away from Parliament, far away from the President or far away from the center of political power, life should not feel like a distance.