Re-imagine Ghana with Hene Aku Kwapong, PhD: Mass capability: Why China got rich, India lagged — and what we must learn

There is a certain kind of development story that sounds convincing because it is simple and popular to the masses. One country liberalized earlier. Another liberalized later. One country had better policies. Another had worse policies. One country had authoritarian discipline. Another had democratic debate. The conclusion then follows neatly: copy the successful country’s policies and prosperity will arrive.

If only development were that convenient.

The story of China and India is useful for Ghana precisely because it refuses to be so tidy a story. In 1950, if one had been asked to choose which giant Asian country was more likely to succeed, the sensible bet might have been India.

India had inherited a functioning civil service, courts, parliamentary democracy, English-language higher education and a political leadership that spoke the language of science, secularism and progress. China, by contrast, had emerged from invasion, civil war and ideological upheaval into a revolutionary dictatorship that would soon produce some of the worst man-made disasters of the twentieth century.

Yet the verdict of history has proven uncomfortable. China has become the great manufacturing miracle of the modern age. India became a large and increasingly important economy, yes, but not the industrial juggernaut many expected.

China’s per capita output, roughly comparable to India’s around the late 1970s, became about two and a half times India’s in recent estimates.1 Chinese median income moved far ahead of India’s after the reform era, with one comparative series showing China’s median income rising from below India’s in 1987 to more than twice India’s by 2022.

This is not a story Ghana should read as distant Asian history. It is a mirror, that sheds an illuminating insight on our own predicament.

Last week I discussed Morocco and why they have had compounding success over us since independence and how coherence has been a driving factor. I turn my attention to this India-China story to further understand the opportunities Ghana has missed and what other opportunities remain available.

Ghana, like India, has many of the things outsiders admire: elections, a free press, a talented diaspora, English-language advantages, entrepreneurs, minerals, ports, universities and a culture of public argument. Yet Ghana, like India for much of its post-independence history, has often mistaken these advantages for development itself.

We have celebrated elite success while neglecting mass capability. We have written laws without enforcing them. We have built institutions that look modern from Accra but fail in the village, the classroom, the land office, the clinic and the district assembly. We have treated development as a policy announcement rather than a social transformation.

The India–China lesson is blunt: markets work best when a country has first built people who can participate in them.

China’s Terrible Road to a Useful Lesson

No African country should romanticize Mao’s China. Let me be clear about that. Maoist rule brought repression, mass campaigns, famine, ideological madness and death on a staggering scale. The Great Leap Forward produced the largest famine in modern history, and the Cultural Revolution tore through Chinese society with cruelty and chaos. Nothing in this history should be admired as a model for Ghana or any democratic society.

But it is possible to reject the brutality and still learn from the outcome. By the time China began reforming and opening its economy in 1978, it was still desperately poor. But it was not socially the same country it had been in 1949.

The Chinese state had built mass literacy, basic public health, women’s participation and a workforce far more prepared for industrialization than its income level suggested. Adult literacy rose dramatically during the Mao era, life expectancy increased sharply, child mortality fell substantially, and women entered public economic life in numbers that transformed the available labor force.

This is the part of the story that too many development debates miss. China did not become rich simply because Deng Xiaoping allowed markets to function. Markets mattered enormously, but they were introduced into a society that had already undergone a brutal but real social modernization. China had hundreds of millions of people who were poor enough to be globally competitive, but healthy enough, literate enough and disciplined enough to be trained for industrial work.

That is an explosive combination.

India’s story was more humane, more democratic and more legally respectable. But it was also more compromised. India passed reforms, but often failed to enforce them. It built elite technical institutions, but neglected mass education. It protected democracy, but left much of the old social order intact. It produced brilliant engineers, but not enough literate, healthy and mobile workers for manufacturing on Chinese scale. It created islands of excellence in a sea of underinvestment.

Ghana should pause here, because this should sound familiar.

Ghana’s India Problem

Ghana’s development problem is not that it lacks talent or potential. It is that talent is too thinly distributed across the whole society and too poorly organized by the state. We have excellent individuals, but weak systems. We have bright students, but too many children who cannot read with confidence.

We have capable doctors and nurses, but preventable disease still reduces productivity. We have impressive entrepreneurs, but most firms operate in an economy where skills, finance, land, infrastructure and policy continuity do not reliably meet.

This is Ghana’s India problem: elite capability without mass capability.

India built the Indian Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institutes of Management, and these helped produce a world-class professional elite. But mass education lagged. China did not begin with world-class universities. It began by making ordinary people more literate, healthier and more available for production. When the world economy opened, China could offer factories not merely cheap labor, but trainable labor at scale.

Ghana has too often followed the Indian temptation. We celebrate the few who make it through the system and mistake them for proof that the system works. We point to brilliant Ghanaians abroad, exceptional students, successful bankers, entrepreneurs, lawyers, doctors and engineers. They are real, and they matter. But they do not by themselves make Ghana an industrial economy.

A country does not industrialize because it has a few excellent people. It industrializes when average capability rises. The decisive question is not whether Ghana can produce a few world-class professionals. It is whether millions of ordinary Ghanaians can read, compute, show up healthy, learn new skills, move to where work is available, trust that land and contracts are enforceable, and participate in a modern economy without being trapped by informal obligations and institutional disorder.

That is the foundation Ghana has not built deeply enough.

The development mistake	What it looks like in India	What it looks like in Ghana and much of Africa
Mistaking elite education for national capability	World-class technical institutes alongside weak mass schooling	Excellent individuals and elite schools alongside widespread foundational learning gaps
Passing laws without implementation	Legal reforms undercut by caste, family authority and weak enforcement	Formal policies weakened by customary land disputes, local gatekeepers and administrative weakness
Treating women as dependents rather than producers	Low female labor-force participation reduced the effective workforce	Women’s enterprise is celebrated rhetorically but constrained by credit, childcare, safety, land access and social expectations
Liberalizing before building capability	Markets opened before mass industrial labor was ready at Chinese scale	Industrial policy announced before workers, power, land, logistics and finance are aligned
Confusing democracy with development capacity	Democratic institutions existed, but service delivery and social reform lagged	Elections function, but execution, continuity and local accountability remain weak

Traditional Authority, Social Obligation and the Modern Economy

The most sensitive lesson is also the most important. Development is not only about roads, factories and budgets. It is about the social rules that determine how people live, work, move, marry, inherit, own land and make decisions.

China’s Communist state destroyed many traditional structures with unacceptable violence. India, by contrast, allowed much of its traditional order to survive. Caste, kinship obligations, patriarchal family structures and local customary authority continued to shape economic life even when national law said otherwise. A woman might have legal rights, but family practice could deny them. A worker might be free in theory, but caste and village obligations could limit mobility. A reform could exist in Parliament and fail in the district.

Ghana has its own version of this problem. It is not caste. It is not Indian patriarchy in the same form. But Ghana does have powerful traditional authority, customary land systems, family obligations, ethnic expectations and local power networks that shape economic life in ways the formal state often pretends not to see.

This is not an argument against chiefs. Chiefs are not the enemy of development. In many communities, traditional leaders carry legitimacy that politicians can only borrow. They settle disputes, preserve identity, mobilize communities and protect continuity. But when traditional authority is not properly integrated into modern governance, it becomes a parallel power system. And parallel power systems create uncertainty.

A modern factory needs land that is secure. A housing policy needs planning that is enforceable. A mining regime needs local authority that supports legality rather than private extraction. A solar manufacturing zone needs predictable permits, infrastructure and community consent.

A district industrial strategy needs chiefs, assemblies and ministries moving in one direction. If each authority can delay a project but no authority is fully responsible for delivering it, development becomes negotiation instead of execution.

This is where Ghana must learn from both China and India without copying either. China crushed traditional authority. India deferred too much to it. Ghana must do something wiser: integrate traditional authority into a constitutional development state.

That means chiefs should have a formal, transparent and accountable role in land-use planning, local economic development and dispute resolution. It also means customary authority cannot be allowed to veto national productivity. Land must be digitized and put in trusts for all to deal through trusts. Titles must be clear. Spatial plans must bind both chiefs and politicians. Community rights must be protected, but the economic use of land cannot remain hostage to endless informal bargaining.

The Ghanaian state must stop behaving as if chieftaincy is merely cultural. It is economic power. And economic power must be organized.

Women Are Not a Social Sector; They Are the Economy

One of the most striking differences between China and India was women’s participation. China’s revolutionary state mobilized women into education and work. India’s reforms were slower, weaker and often blocked by family and social structures. By the late 2010s, India’s female labor-force participation was far below China’s, and India’s total labor force remained much smaller than China’s despite India’s larger population.

This is not a side issue. It is macroeconomics all through and through.

When women are excluded from work, a country is choosing to operate with one arm tied behind its back. When girls are undereducated, the country reduces the quality of the next generation. When women lack land rights, the country weakens agriculture and enterprise.

When childcare is unavailable, firms lose workers and families lose income. When transport is unsafe, women’s labor mobility falls. When credit systems discriminate, businesses never begin.

Ghana cannot become a serious production economy while treating women’s economic participation as a gender program. It is industrial policy. It is fiscal policy. It is productivity policy.

A serious Ghanaian development agenda would therefore place women at the center of national transformation. It would secure women’s land and inheritance rights. It would expand childcare near industrial zones, markets and public institutions.

It would connect girls’ education to science, technology, engineering, manufacturing, agribusiness and digital work. It would make safe transport a labor-market policy. It would design credit systems around women-owned firms not as charity, but as productivity investment.

The country that doubles the effective freedom and capability of its women doubles its development possibilities.

Human Capital Is Not Welfare. It Is Industrial Policy.

Ghana’s public debate also has a way of separating “social services” from “economic policy.” We discuss education, sanitation, nutrition and health as if they belong to a softer, charitable side of government, while the “real economy” is about exchange rates, taxes, roads, gold, cocoa, oil and investors.

This is a serious mistake.

China’s later success depended on earlier human development. Literacy, health, nutrition, discipline and female participation became the invisible infrastructure of industrialization. A factory does not run on machines alone. It runs on workers who can read instructions, follow processes, maintain schedules, solve problems and stay healthy enough to work consistently. A logistics system does not function only because roads exist. It functions because people can coordinate, measure, record, repair and manage complexity.

For Ghana and sub-Saharan Africa, this means the basics are not basic because they are small. They are basic because everything else rests on them.

A child who cannot read by age ten is not only an education statistic. He is a future productivity problem. A girl pulled out of school is not only a social tragedy. She is a reduction in national income. A stunted child is not only a health concern. She is a permanent loss of cognitive and economic potential. A young person who completes school without numeracy is not merely unemployed; he is proof that the state has converted years of schooling into too little capability.

This is why Ghana must treat foundational learning, nutrition, sanitation, preventive healthcare and technical training as the first layer of industrial strategy. Not after roads. Not after factories. Before them and alongside them.

The State Must Make Reform Real

Another lesson from India is that laws are not the same as transformation. India often had reformist intentions. It passed laws against social practices that damaged women. It attempted land reform. It created formal rights. But in many places, local society, family authority, caste networks and weak enforcement diluted the impact of reform.

Ghana also knows how to pass laws. We know how to create authorities, commissions, agencies, policies and national frameworks. What we often lack is the machinery that makes reform real where people live.

A policy announced in Accra must eventually become a functioning school in Bawku, a digitized land record in Kumasi, a working clinic in Keta, a reliable industrial power connection in Tema, a safe transport route in Tamale, a court decision enforced in Cape Coast, a mining law obeyed in Tarkwa, and a district development plan respected by chiefs, assemblies and politicians alike.

That is state capacity. It is not glamorous. It rarely wins elections by itself. But without it, countries become experts in performance rather than delivery.

Sub-Saharan Africa’s development challenge is not simply that its states are too small or too large. It is that many states are too weak where they must be strong and too intrusive where they should be enabling. They struggle to teach children, enforce contracts, plan land, maintain roads, regulate mining, discipline public finance and support firms. Yet they can still harass businesses, multiply permits, delay approvals and distribute favors.

A developmental state is not a state that announces more. It is a state that executes better.

What Ghana and Sub-Saharan Africa Should Do Now

The lesson from China is not authoritarianism. The lesson from India is not that democracy fails. The lesson from both is that countries become rich when they build capable people and organize social life around production.

Ghana and sub-Saharan African countries therefore need a practical human-capital and social-modernization compact.

First, Ghana should declare foundational learning a national emergency. Every child must be able to read, write and calculate by the end of primary school. This cannot be left to speeches. It requires teacher accountability, school leadership reform, regular assessment, targeted remediation, mother-tongue literacy where appropriate, instructional materials and public reporting of results district by district.

Second, nutrition and early childhood development must become economic priorities. The first thousand days of life shape future productivity. School feeding, maternal health, anemia reduction, sanitation and child growth monitoring are not merely welfare expenditures. They are investments in the future labor force.

Third, Ghana must modernize land and traditional authority together. Chiefs should be partners in development, not informal gatekeepers outside the planning system. Customary lands must be mapped and digitized. Land transactions must become transparent. District spatial plans must be enforceable. Industrial land must be protected. Land-dispute resolution must be fast, specialized and credible.

Fourth, women’s economic participation must become a national productivity mission. Ghana should build childcare systems around markets, industrial zones and public workplaces; enforce women’s property and inheritance rights; expand safe transport; support women-owned firms with serious finance; and connect girls’ education to the industries Ghana wants to build.

Fifth, technical and vocational education must be tied to production missions. If Ghana wants to build agro-processing, solar manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, logistics, textiles, digital services and gold value addition, training institutions must be designed around those sectors. Students should not graduate into the abstract hope that the economy will somehow absorb them. The education system must be wired into the production system.

Sixth, Ghana must build execution institutions that survive politics. Development cannot restart every four years. A serious republic needs policy continuity, professional delivery units, public dashboards, independent evaluation and parliamentary scrutiny before major national programs are abandoned or rebranded.

Seventh, sub-Saharan African countries must stop designing development strategies around elite islands. A few good universities, a few start-ups, a few industrial parks and a few export firms cannot transform a society if the mass base remains weak. The real question is whether the average citizen is becoming more literate, healthier, more mobile, more productive and freer to participate in economic life.

There is a story version of Ghana’s future in which the country becomes prosperous because it has gold, cocoa, lithium, oil, sunshine, ports, democracy, music, tourism and diaspora affection. These are advantages. But they are not a development strategy.

China’s rise teaches that when a country has built mass human capability, market opening can produce astonishing results. India’s slower path teaches that democracy, elite education and formal laws are not enough when the social foundations of development remain incomplete. Ghana’s own experience teaches that resources and elections cannot compensate for weak execution, uncertain land, underdeveloped human capital and fragmented authority.

The Ghanaian question, then, is not whether we admire China or India. The question is whether we are willing to do the basics with seriousness.

Can we teach every child to read? Can we make girls and women full economic citizens? Can we make land predictable? Can we integrate traditional authority into development rather than leave it as a parallel system? Can we build health, nutrition and sanitation into our productivity agenda? Can we connect education to industry? Can we make policies survive elections? Can we enforce laws beyond Accra?

If the answer is no, then Ghana will continue to produce brilliant individuals in a weak system. We will continue to celebrate potential while importing the goods that other countries learned to make. We will continue to confuse democratic performance with developmental capacity.

But if the answer is yes, then Ghana can still build a different future. Not by copying China’s brutality. Not by dismissing India’s democracy. Not by pretending that African traditions must be destroyed. Ghana’s path must be democratic, humane and rooted in its own society.

But it must also be serious.

Because development is not magic. It is not even mainly ideology. It is the long, patient, disciplined work of building people—and then building institutions strong enough to let those people produce, move, learn, invest, work and flourish.

China got rich because, by the time markets arrived, its people had been made ready for production. India lagged because too many of its people were left outside that readiness. Ghana’s future will depend on which lesson we choose to learn.

Hene Aku Kwapong, CDD Ghana Fellow, Ecobank Ghana Board Member, Former Head of Management for Royal Bank of Scotland EMEA Credit Markets, formerly of Deutsche Bank, Microsoft, GE Capital and NY Economic Development Corporation.

Post Views: 27