No Conditions Attached: Rethinking Ghana’s Duty Of Care For Citizens In Crisis Abroad (1)

The writer

Paying for it without waiting for the next crisis

The unbudgeted GH¢49 million spent on the South Africa evacuation is the exact failure a standing fund is meant to prevent. Ghana issues passports, visas, and consular services to hundreds of thousands of its citizens abroad every year, transactions that already happen regardless of whether a fund exists.

A modest charge added to those transactions, one most applicants would barely notice, would build a pool that sits outside the annual budget so the money is already there when it is needed rather than requested after a crisis has already happened.

An opt-in contribution for Ghanaians in longer-term overseas employment, structured like a pension top-up, would let those who can afford it build a larger personal cushion, while the base levy covers everyone else regardless of income.

None of this removes the need for proper financial controls: an elected diaspora advisory panel, drawn from accredited associations in the regions named above, should hold genuine authority to question how the fund is spent, rather than the fund answering only to the ministry that also controls its budget.

The obvious objection is that this is harder to run than it sounds: verifying a rent invoice in Antwerp, a hospital bill in Hamburg, and a customs dispute in Doha, in three currencies and three legal systems, is a genuinely different administrative task from cutting a single cheque.

That is true, and it is not a reason to avoid the design; it is a reason to phase it. A fund could reasonably launch with direct payment capability in the handful of cities holding the largest, most established communities, London, New York, Toronto, and Hamburg among them, while cash disbursement through the mission remains the fallback everywhere else until local banking and verification partners are in place.

Fraud risk does not disappear either way, but it is considerably easier to catch a falsified invoice tied to a named property and a documented tenancy than to explain, after the fact, where a lump sum actually went.

Where the host country already owes something

Where a citizen is legally resident, employed, and was paying tax and National Insurance, or its equivalent, before things went wrong, the mission’s job changes from provider to advocate.

Under UK law, the specific benefits withheld from someone subject to a no recourse to public funds condition are set out in paragraph 6 of the Immigration Rules, made under section 115 of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999, and the list is confined to defined means-tested support, Universal Credit, Income Support, and housing assistance among them.

It says nothing about contribution-based benefits such as New Style Jobseeker’s Allowance and New Style Employment and Support Allowance, which depend on a claimant’s own National Insurance record rather than their immigration status, and it has no bearing on Statutory Sick Pay, which employers fund directly regardless of a worker’s visa conditions.

Any Ghanaian worker who has contributed long enough is very often entitled to support the host state already owes her, and does not know to ask for it. This distinction is not a UK peculiarity either: most European welfare states separate insurance-based entitlements, built on a worker’s own contribution record, from means-tested support restricted by immigration status, even where the exact terminology differs. Consular staff should be trained to spot this and to make the case directly to the relevant host agency, treating what the host country already owes as the first line of response and Ghana’s own fund as the layer underneath it, not a replacement for it.

A narrow place for repatriation

None of this removes repatriation from the fund’s scope, but it should sit at the edge of it, not the centre. It belongs to cases where a citizen’s life is genuinely at risk or where they choose to return, and it should never be offered as the default answer to distress simply because it closes a case file faster than sorting out rent arrears or a delayed benefit claim.

Before it is offered at all, a mission needs to know whether the person’s own immigration status, rather than a temporary shortage of money, is the actual obstacle, since those are different problems requiring different responses. Most of the citizens this fund exists for do not want repatriation, and have had no equivalent option built for them until now.

Ghana’s diaspora runs from New York to London, Hamburg to Toronto, Doha to Beirut, and a Guangzhou trading district that has operated for a generation without much notice from Accra. It generates remittances that rank among the country’s largest sources of foreign exchange, income the state collects without having to build anything in return.

The obligation runs the other way too, and it should not narrow the further a citizen travels from home. A state that can locate its citizens for tax purposes, election registers, and passport renewals has the infrastructure to locate them for this as well; what has been missing is the will to treat that infrastructure as a duty rather than an administrative convenience.

Ghana now has a genuine chance to build a mechanism shaped by where its people actually are, rather than the version of the diaspora that only becomes visible when one case goes viral.

**By Dominic Senayah **

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