Let me start with a simple observation. For much of Ghana’s history since independence, the good life meant one thing above all: a secure job. You went to school, you worked hard, you got your qualifications, and in return society offered you a fair deal — a respectable position, a steady wage, a family you could support. That was the bargain. Government offices, banks, schools, factories, the big employers — these were not just places you clocked in and out of. They were the institutions around which people built their whole lives.
That bargain is changing. And I think we need to be honest about why, and honest about what it means.
Today, a growing number of young Ghanaians no longer see a job as the destination. They see it as one part of something bigger. A young person might work for a company by day, run a small business in the evening, and serve clients on the other side of the world by night. This is not simply a “side hustle” culture, as it’s sometimes dismissively called. It is something more serious than that. It is a new idea of what economic independence actually means.
I want to be clear about this: the language of “hustling” undersells what is happening. Behind it is a generation responding, sensibly and resourcefully, to hard economic facts. The cost of living has gone up. Secure, well-paid jobs have not kept pace with the ambitions — or the numbers — of an educated young population. For many, relying on a single income no longer feels prudent. It feels risky.
And so, people have done what sensible people do. They have adapted.
A young professional in Accra works a full-time job and sells clothes online in her spare time. A teacher caters for weddings at weekends. A graphic designer works for a Ghanaian firm by day and takes freelance briefs from clients abroad by night. A nurse sells cosmetics on social media. A lawyer consults outside office hours. None of this is laziness or distraction. It is adaptation — hard-headed, practical adaptation to a labour market that looks very different from the one our parents knew.
A university degree, once a fairly reliable passport to a stable career, no longer comes with that guarantee. It still matters — I don’t want to suggest otherwise — but its value now depends on what a graduate can actually do with it, how widely those skills travel, and whether they can be turned into income beyond a single employer.
This is producing a genuine and important shift: work is being separated from the idea of one fixed workplace. A laptop, a smartphone, a decent internet connection — these have created a second labour market that runs alongside the traditional one. It is informal in places, international in others, and it matters more with every year that passes.
This is, I think, one of the more remarkable developments in Ghana’s economic life. Previous generations had to go to where the opportunity was — often that meant leaving home, leaving the country. Today’s generation, in many professions, can bring the opportunity to where they live. A Ghanaian who can write, code, design, market, animate, account or assist virtually can serve a client in London or Lagos without ever boarding a plane. That is a profound change, and it deserves to be treated as one.
But let us not romanticise this. Flexibility is not the same as ease.
The young Ghanaian juggling a job and a business is often working longer hours than his or her parents ever did. The office closes at five; the second job begins soon after. Orders need answering, customers need calling, products need delivering, accounts need balancing. The digital worker may be up past midnight because the client is in a different time zone entirely. What looks, from the outside, like entrepreneurial freedom often involves real and considerable personal sacrifice. We should say so plainly, not pretend it away.
There is something else going on here too — something about control. A salary gives you regularity, but it also sets a ceiling. A business, however modest, offers the possibility of growth beyond that ceiling. And digital work opens a door to markets well beyond Ghana’s own economy. Taken together, this is why the new Ghanaian dream is being built not around one career, but around several income streams at once.
You can hear this in how young people now describe themselves. “What is your job?” no longer captures it. Someone may be an accountant by profession, a photographer by practice and a trader by enterprise. Another may be a civil servant who farms on weekends and teaches online courses in the evening. This is not a generation that cannot settle. It is a generation that has learned, sensibly, not to place all its hopes in a single institution.
Now, I don’t want to suggest this model is without serious problems, because it plainly is not. Many small businesses struggle to turn a profit. Capital is limited; margins are thin. Digital workers contend with unreliable internet, payment difficulties and fierce international competition. And we should be honest that some people are not starting businesses because they have spotted a brilliant opportunity — they are starting them because formal employment has simply failed to pay them enough.
That distinction matters enormously. Entrepreneurship must never become an excuse for tolerating an economy in which young people have to invent two or three jobs just to get by decently.
So, the real question is not whether young Ghanaians should hustle harder. They already are — harder, in fact, than almost any generation before them. The real question is whether we can build an economic environment supportive enough to turn that effort into something lasting.
That means serious attention to access to finance, to digital infrastructure, to skills, to tax policy, to market access, to the rules that govern small business. And it means recognising digital work for what it is — an emerging and permanent part of the labour market, not a hobby carried out by young people with laptops.
Because the potential here is real. If the young woman selling clothes on social media can grow from a bedroom operation into a properly registered business employing two or three people, then her hustle has become a contribution to national employment. If the freelance developer earning income from abroad goes on to found a technology company here at home, then individual survival has become productive investment. That is the prize on offer, if we get the conditions right.
So let us be clear about the aim. It is not to romanticise the hustle. It is to help the hustle become a business.
This, I think, is the heart of the matter. Young Ghanaians are not simply looking for more ways to fill their evenings. They are searching for economic security in an age when the old promise — one job, for life, providing everything — no longer holds. The aspiration itself has not changed: a decent home, a secure family, financial independence, the freedom to choose one’s own path. What has changed is the route to get there.
The old Ghanaian dream was built around the job. The new one is built around the job, the business, and the ability to earn beyond the walls of the conventional workplace.
It is a demanding dream — perhaps more demanding than it should have to be. But it is also proof of real, hard-earned resilience. Ghana’s young people are meeting the economy they have inherited with the tools available to them, making opportunity where they can find it, and refusing to bet their whole future on one source of income.
Our task — and I do think of it as a shared task, for government and society alike — is to make sure this resourcefulness is not merely a means of getting by. It should become the foundation for enterprise, for innovation, for decent and lasting employment.
Because in the end, the ambition of Ghana’s young people is not simply to work more. It is to have more choices. And the true measure of the new Ghanaian dream will be whether the economy can finally give them those choices.
The author, Vincent Letsa Kobla (V. L. K.) Djokoto, is a partner at D. K. T. Djokoto & Co
