Ghana’s public infrastructure carries a familiar pattern: projects that cost 35 to 60 per cent above approved estimates, finish years late and are never formally evaluated afterwards.
Procurement fraud, inflated unit prices and weak supervision drain resources that should reach communities
Existing legislation, the Public Procurement Act, the Audit Service Act, and Article 187 of the Constitution, focused on procedural compliance, not whether public funds delivered genuine value.
The Value for Money Office Bill, 2026, is Parliament’s attempt to close that gap permanently.
Bill
Three provisions will determine whether this Bill transforms infrastructure delivery or becomes another layer of paperwork.
The most consequential is the mandatory Certificate of Clearance under Clause 31.
No public contract above the prescribed threshold may be awarded without one; any contract executed without it is null and void.
This is the most powerful change in Ghana’s procurement history.
Every major project must pass an independent value test before a single cedi is committed.
lause 34 requires a pre-award assessment of cost estimates against prevailing market benchmarks.
This directly targets the optimism bias, the entrenched tendency to underestimate costs to secure project approval, that has historically generated runaway overruns.
Clause 35 mandates post-completion assessments documenting variance between planned and actual costs, timelines and outputs.
For the first time, Ghana will have a systematic institutional record of how public projects actually performed, feeding lessons back into future appraisals.
Ghana has enacted serious procurement reform before.
The Public Procurement Act, 2003, and the Public Financial Management Act, 2016, were both well-designed.
Both were imperfectly implemented because the gap between legislative intent and institutional capacity was never systematically closed.
Three risks threaten this Bill. The pre-award assessment requires professionally competent quantity surveyors and economists in every Ministry, Department, and Agency, a cadre that does not yet exist on a scale.
Clause 42 mandates capacity building, but that obligation must be funded from Day One.
The digital platform must be integrated with GHANEPS, not built in isolation; two disconnected systems would defeat the audit trail that gives the Bill its teeth.
And the Office’s independence will be tested when assessments delay politically sensitive projects. Parliament, civil society, and the media must defend that independence at those moments.
Parliament
Parliament should pass the Bill without significant delay. The minister of finance must prescribe interim monetary thresholds within ninety days to prevent high-value contracts proceeding without assessment.
The VfM Office Secretariat, Director-General, and digital platform must be operational within 18 months. High-spending ministries in Roads, Health, and Education should establish functional VfM Units first. Within three years, GHANEPS and the VfM digital system must be merged into a single lifecycle audit trail.
Conclusion
The Value for Money Office Bill, 2026, is the most serious attempt Ghana has made to institutionalise accountability for public spending. Its provisions are well-designed.
What determines whether they succeed is not what is written but what is built afterwards: funded institutions, integrated systems, professional capacity, and political will that holds under pressure.
Where value-for-money disciplines are genuinely embedded as mandatory preconditions, procurement outcomes improve, and waste falls.
The Bill provides the legal foundation. What Parliament, the Ministry of Finance, and Ghanaian citizens do next will determine whether that foundation becomes a building or a document.
The views expressed are those of the author in his academic capacity and do not represent the official position of the Ministry of Roads and Highways, Ghana, or any other institution.
