Ghana is on course to meet the UN target of a 5 per cent reduction in the number of stunted children by 2025. The country has also made some progress in reducing wasting, low birth weight, and anaemia among women of reproductive age. Despite these achievements, it is far from reaching the global targets for exclusive breastfeeding, obesity in the life cycle stages, high blood pressure and diabetes among men and women, and women's sodium intake. Nutrition policies are inevitable to address the growing burden of malnutrition in Ghana.

This paper seeks to assess the extent to which Ghana's free Senior High School (SHS) policy has coincided with an increase in SHS attainment. The paper also examines how participation in SHS has improved since the introduction of the policy by sex and consumption quintiles. The paper uses data from the Ghana Living Standards Surveys (GLSS) 2012, 2017 and from the Annual Household Income and Expenditure Survey (2022). The results suggest that there has been a surge in enrollment at the SHS level since the introduction of the policy in 2017.

Most sub-Saharan African countries are endowed with natural resources such as minerals, natural gas and petroleum but often lag behind other continents in human development outcomes, remaining dependent on varying degrees of foreign aid to finance social programmes. There is some debate that resource-rich countries that are also democracies are more likely to produce political institutions that promote linkages between resource revenues and human development outcomes.  However, the evidence interrogating these linkages on the African continent has not been explored fully.

To raise the country's tax-to-Gross Domestic Product (GDP) ratio and help balance its budget, the Government of Ghana has since 2021 introduced more than ten new taxes. Among these policies, the Electronic Transactions Levy (e-levy), which imposed a tax on mobile money (momo) transactions over a GHS100 daily threshold, has been the most contentious. The E-levy controversy provides an opportunity to contribute to ongoing discussions about the prospects of leveraging crisis-induced solidarity to boost revenue mobilisation.

In the last decades, China has emerged as Africa's biggest bilateral trading partner, one of the top five foreign direct investors and a significant contributor of development finance. Chinese demand for African natural resources and agricultural commodities has had an important impact on the performance of African economies over the past decade and Chinese investments in the infrastructure sector roads, power, ports, harbours and new airports have opened up opportunities for African producers and merchants.