Ghana signs US deal to send nurses to Columbus, Ohio

Ghana’s Ministry of Health has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the City of Columbus, Ohio, opening a formal pathway for Ghanaian nurses to work in the United States, according to a ministry statement issued Tuesday.

The Ministries of Health and Labour, Jobs and Employment signed the agreement following what the ministry described as months of technical talks with US counterparts.

The MoU is a framework agreement, not a deployment contract: it sets the stage for further, unspecified arrangements governing recruitment and deployment, rather than fixing numbers, timelines, or job terms. The ministry statement gives no figures for how many nurses might be recruited or when placements could begin.

Health Minister Kwabena Mintah Akandoh said the agreement “goes beyond recruitment” and that any deployment must protect workers’ rights, welfare and professional interests — a characterization from the minister rather than a detail independently verifiable from the MoU’s text, which has not been published. He linked the deal to Ghana’s Migration Policy and to an existing Sister-City relationship between Accra and Columbus, as well as the Ghana Labour Exchange Programme.

The agreement extends a pattern of health-worker labour migration deals Ghana has pursued this year, including an active arrangement with Jamaica under which nurses have already been deployed in batches, and a separate agreement to send 250 health professionals to Grenada over two years. Ghana’s government said in July it expected to sign similar MoUs with the US and UK.

Unresolved questions: The statement does not specify recruitment numbers, a start date, visa categories, wage terms, or the “ethical recruitment” standards it invokes — details that will determine whether the deal meaningfully differs from Ghana’s earlier bilateral nurse-migration arrangements. Ghana faces its own nursing shortages alongside a backlog of roughly 105,000 unemployed health professionals reported earlier this year, a tension the statement does not address.

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