18/04/2026
English Isn't Enough — And Ghana's Businesses Know It
Walk through Makola Market on a Wednesday afternoon. Then do the same at Kejetia in Kumasi. Listen past the noise and pay attention to the actual language of trade — the negotiations, the credit agreements, the pricing disputes, the relationship-building that keeps supply chains moving.
You're hearing Twi. Ga. Ewe, Hausa, Dagbani. The languages that the informal economy, which accounts for the overwhelming share of Ghana's GDP, actually runs on.
Now ask yourself: when corporate Ghana wants to reach those same traders, farmers, and small business owners, what does it send them?
A 160-character SMS. In formal English.
And then, in some boardroom somewhere, someone pulls up a campaign report and wonders why conversion is sitting at 2%.
Literacy and Comfort Are Not the Same Thing
Marketing teams push back on this with a familiar argument: Ghana's English literacy rate is relatively high, so language shouldn't be the barrier. It's a reasonable point on the surface. But it conflates two very different things.
Being able to read English is not the same as feeling at ease making financial decisions in it. When someone is reading about a new loan, a change to their insurance terms, or a payment that's overdue, they're not in the mood to parse formal language. They want to understand immediately, instinctively, without any friction between the words and the meaning. Under pressure, people think in their first language. That's not a literacy gap — it's human nature.
There's also a more straightforward accessibility problem that doesn't get discussed enough. For older customers, or those in rural areas with limited formal education, an English text message isn't just inconvenient — it's effectively invisible. If your communication strategy requires the recipient to find help before they can even understand what you're asking, the message has already failed.
The Case for Voice
The scalable answer to this isn't hiring hundreds of multilingual call centre agents. It's voice broadcasting — automated audio messages delivered directly to a customer's phone.
The mechanics are simple: you record a message, the system calls your contact list, and when someone picks up, they hear it. No data connection required. No smartphone needed. It works on the most basic handset, which matters enormously in a market where feature phones are still the norm for large segments of the population.
But the more important advantage isn't technical — it's human. Voice carries something text never can. Tone, warmth, urgency, reassurance. A recorded message in fluent Ewe, delivered by a voice that sounds like it belongs to the community it's addressing, lands completely differently than a typed alert ever could.
What This Looks Like in Practice
An agro-processing company needs to send weather alerts and fertilizer guidance to farmers in the Volta Region. An English SMS might go unread, or misunderstood, or simply ignored. The same information delivered as a Voice SMS in Ewe — clearly spoken, by someone who sounds authoritative and local — gets listened to. It gets acted on.
Or take a microfinance institution chasing payment reminders. A sterile English text can feel like a threat. A polite voice message in Twi, walking a customer through how to restructure a payment via USSD, feels like it came from someone who actually wants to help. That distinction changes behaviour.
At Wigal, we've seen this play out across enough campaigns to say it with confidence: language localisation isn't a nice-to-have. It moves numbers.
The Logistics Are Easier Than They Used To Be
Running multilingual voice campaigns used to be genuinely complicated — coordinating recordings, managing segmented lists, ensuring delivery across networks. The infrastructure has caught up. Businesses can now segment contacts by region or language preference, upload separate audio files for each, and let the platform handle simultaneous delivery at scale. You can layer in IVR functionality too, so a customer can respond immediately — press to renew a policy, press to speak to someone — without the conversation ending at the broadcast.
The Point
A world-class product explained in a language your customer doesn't instinctively trust is still a hard sell. In a competitive market, the businesses that build durable customer relationships won't necessarily be the ones with the most sophisticated technology. They'll be the ones that made the effort to sound like they actually belong to the communities they're serving.
What share of your customer communication currently happens in a local Ghanaian language? It's worth calculating — the gap might be larger than expected.
By: Lawrence Amoah | Head of Operations, Wigal Vision Ltd.