In a country where more than 3,000 babies die before their first birthday every month, the decision to remove financial barriers to basic healthcare is not a policy option. It is a moral obligation.
By Dzifa Gunu, CEO, Ghana Digital Centres Limited
The National Democratic Congress has always understood governance as an instrument of social transformation. From the expansion of the National Health Insurance Scheme to the building of community hospitals in districts that had never had them, from free school uniforms to subsidised fertiliser for smallholder farmers, the NDC’s governing philosophy has consistently been animated by a single conviction: that the state exists to serve its most vulnerable citizens first. Against that backdrop, the Free Primary Healthcare Programme is not simply another policy announcement. It is the culmination of decades of NDC thinking about what a just society owes its people, delivered at a scale that has no precedent in the country’s history.
To understand why this matters, you must first understand the problem it is solving. Ghana’s healthcare system has long operated as a dual reality. For those with means, access to quality care, though imperfect, is achievable. For the rural poor, the urban working class, the fishmonger at dawn markets and the subsistence farmer in the Northern Savannah, the system has been characterised by distance, cost, bureaucratic complexity and chronic under-resourcing. The NHIS, for all its ambition, has failed to bridge this gap. Independent surveys conducted ahead of the 2024 election found that fewer than 23 per cent of people in rural communities held a valid NHIS card, even though every Ghanaian contributes to the levy through daily commercial transactions. Less than 45 per cent of CHPS compounds were accredited to provide NHIS services.
The human cost of this exclusion is staggering and largely invisible. Figures cited by First Lady Mrs Lordina Mahama at a fundraising event in New York in September 2025 told a story that should disturb every conscience: more than 3,000 Ghanaian babies die before their first birthday every single month. The infant mortality rate stands at 52 deaths per 1,000 live births. The maternal mortality rate is 103 deaths per 100,000 live births. These are not inevitable statistics. They are the arithmetic of a healthcare system that arrives too late, costs too much and is too far from the people who need it most.
Free Primary Healthcare addresses this failure at the root. Under the programme, any Ghanaian presenting at a CHPS compound, health centre or polyclinic will receive essential health services without cost, regardless of insurance status. The package prioritises prevention, early detection and treatment at the community level, precisely the point in the care continuum where the greatest gains can be made at the lowest cost. Catching hypertension before it becomes a stroke. Identifying anaemia in a pregnant woman before it becomes a maternal death. Treating malaria in a child before it becomes cerebral complications. These are not abstract public health arguments. They are the daily realities of communities that have been waiting, for decades, to be seen.
“Health is the engine of productivity. It is the currency of our dignity. It is our greatest public good.” — President John Dramani Mahama
The programme does not stand alone. It is embedded within a comprehensive infrastructure and human resource transformation that gives it the capacity to be more than a promise. The 2026 budget allocated GH¢600 million for the construction of three new regional hospitals in the Savannah, Oti and Western North regions, areas that have historically been among the most underserved in the country. The government committed to completing outstanding CHPS compounds, with the target of bringing the total to approximately 6,000 functional facilities nationwide. Over 50 per cent of existing CHPS compounds were acknowledged bythe Health Minister to lack basic tools and equipment; a major retooling exercise is underway to address this. Seven hundred medical doctors are being deployed to facilities across the country, with specific incentives for those accepting postings in rural and underserved communities.
The digital dimension deserves particular attention. In a story shared by President Mahama at the Africa Health Sovereignty Summit, a young mother in Dodowa survived a dangerous childbirth complication because the local CHPS facility was digitally linked to a regional hospital. That real-time connection saved her life. As Ghana expands its CHPS network and deploys community health volunteers to promote preventive care and wellness services, the integration of digital health infrastructure into primary care is not an afterthought but a foundational design principle. This is where the work of institutions like Ghana Digital Centres Limited becomes part of the broader story of national transformation.
The Free Primary Healthcare Programme is complemented by MahamaCare, the Ghana Medical Trust Fund, which addresses the other end of the disease spectrum. Non-communicable diseases such as kidney failure, cancer, hypertension, sickle cell disease and diabetes have seen a significant rise over the past decade. These conditions are devastating not only medically but financially, capable of reducing entire families to destitution through the cost of treatment. With GH¢2.3 billion allocated and the fund now fully operational with a board and secretariat in place, MahamaCare provides a sovereign financial cushion for the most vulnerable patients, mobilising public, private and philanthropic capital in a model designed to be sustainable rather than dependent on donor whim.
Taken together, these two pillars represent the most comprehensive social intervention in Ghana’s healthcare history. Free primary care for prevention and early treatment. A sovereign trust fund for catastrophic illness. New hospitals in the most neglected regions. Thousands of CHPS compounds retooled and staffed. Seven hundred new doctors deployed. A health budget that, for the first time, uses the word investment with sincerity.
I became a political activist because I believed that government could do this. That it could look at the most vulnerable members of society and choose, deliberately and structurally, to put them first. In the NDC, I found a political home that shared that belief. In President Mahama’s return to government, I see that belief translated into budgets, bills and buildings. The pride I feel is inseparable from the gratitude I know millions of Ghanaians will feel on 15 April when they walk into a health centre and are, for the first time, told that they will be helped without cost. That moment is the point of it all.
