Why I Returned to Ghana — and Why I Chose to Study Here Again

The question is not whether Ghana or abroad offers the “better” education. It is what kind of education you need, for what purpose, and what you intend to do with it.

A lot of people ask me why I returned to Ghana after completing my postgraduate degree at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom.

Those who know I am now pursuing a PhD often ask a second question:

“Why didn’t you do the PhD in the UK — or somewhere abroad?”

There is a straightforward answer to the first question.

I returned because I had to.

I studied at Sussex as a Chevening Scholar, and part of the scholarship commitment was to return to my home country after my studies and apply the knowledge, networks, experiences and skills I had gained towards its development.

I took that commitment seriously.

The second question also has a practical answer. Within the period following my return, I had taken up a country manager role in the carbon sector. My work was taking me into communities and households where clean cooking and energy access were not abstract development concepts but everyday realities.

I could see the connection between what I had studied and what I was now doing.

I was working. I was learning. And, in my own small way, I felt I was making a difference.

But I have come to realise that these are not really the answers many people are looking for.

What the question sometimes really means

When someone asks, “Why didn’t you stay abroad?”, there is often another question beneath it.

Why would you come back when there are supposedly better jobs, stronger universities, higher incomes, better infrastructure and greater opportunities elsewhere?

For many people from communities like the one in which I grew up, migration represents something important: possibility.

It can mean economic security. Professional advancement. Better services. Exposure. Sometimes, it is the opportunity to support an entire family from a distance.

And rightly so.

There is no virtue in pretending that the opportunities available to a young professional in Accra are identical to those available in London, New York or Geneva.

They are not.

But having studied at postgraduate level both in Ghana and in the UK, I have also experienced something more complicated than the simple idea that one education system is “good” and the other is “bad.”

Studying Africa from Africa

My first postgraduate degree was at the University of Ghana.

One of the things I appreciate more now about that experience is how close many of our intellectual conversations were to the realities we were attempting to understand.

I encountered thinkers such as Claude Ake, whose work on democracy and development challenged us to examine African political and economic realities on their own terms. There were also scholars such as Thandika Mkandawire, Simon Bawakyillenuo, Adebayo Adedeji, Augustine Fosu, Mahmood Mamdani, Samir Amin, Dan-Bright S. Dzorgbo and many others whose work forced us to wrestle with African institutions, states, economies and societies rather than simply treat the continent as an illustration of theories developed somewhere else.

The theories mattered.

But so did the places from which we were interrogating them.

A discussion about decentralisation could quickly become a discussion about a district we knew. A debate about poverty could be tested against communities we had lived in or visited. Governance, inequality, agriculture, informality and development were not distant case studies.

They were outside the classroom.

That proximity does something to how you learn.

Then I went to Sussex

Studying at the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex gave me something different.

I encountered a truly international classroom.

People came with experiences from Africa, Asia, Latin America, Europe and elsewhere. Development problems could be examined comparatively, and arguments that seemed obvious in one context suddenly looked very different when someone from another part of the world challenged them.

Opportunity is also shaped by institutions

There was another contrast I could not ignore.

As an undergraduate at the University of Cape Coast, I once nursed the ambition of running for student leadership. I was interested in serving, and I believed I had something to contribute. But I quickly realised that contesting for student office could demand significant financial and other resources. At that stage of my life, those demands competed directly with the resources I needed for my academic journey.

So I stepped away.

Years later, in the UK, I found myself considering student leadership again.

This time, I ran against five other candidates.

I did not have to spend money campaigning. There were no expensive posters, elaborate campaign activities or financial expectations that made me question whether I could afford to participate. I had to communicate what I stood for, explain what I hoped to do and convince fellow students that my ideas were worth supporting.

And I won.

That experience stayed with me because it demonstrated something larger than a student election.

Talent and ambition exist everywhere. But whether people can translate them into leadership, influence and opportunity often depends on the institutions around them.

A system that makes participation expensive can unintentionally exclude capable people before their ideas are ever heard. A system that lowers those barriers gives more people the chance to compete on the strength of their ideas, credibility and ability to persuade.

This is not to suggest that politics or student leadership in the UK is somehow free of inequality, nor that every election in Ghana is determined by money. But my experience of the two environments was strikingly different.

It made me think more deeply about development itself.

Sometimes what separates two societies is not the quality of their people.

It is the rules, institutions and systems that determine whose potential gets a chance to emerge.

The exposure was enormous.

So was access to knowledge.

If I found an academic paper I wanted to read, I rarely had to think about whether I could access it. Journals, databases, books and digital resources were part of the learning infrastructure around me.

That experience has made one of the inequalities in global higher education particularly difficult for me to ignore.

Today, while doing doctoral research in Ghana, I can sometimes identify exactly the article I need and still encounter a paywall asking me to pay an amount that is completely unrealistic for an individual researcher.

Sometimes I search another database.

Sometimes I look for an open-access version.

And sometimes I message a friend studying or working at a university abroad:

“Can you download this paper for me?”

There is something deeply unequal about that.

The problem is not intellectual ability.

It is access.

But access is only part of the story

My experience in the UK also introduced me to another debate.

As a student leader at IDS, I participated in conversations and campaigns around the decolonisation of academia.

Students were asking difficult questions.

Whose knowledge dominates our reading lists?

Who gets cited?

Which societies generate “theory,” and which ones appear mainly as “case studies”?

Why should someone have to travel thousands of kilometres away from Africa to encounter an institution that is now trying to bring more African voices into its curriculum?

The irony was difficult to miss.

In Ghana, I sometimes struggled with access to global academic resources.

In Britain, we sometimes struggled with whether the global academic resources we had such excellent access to adequately represented the intellectual traditions and lived realities of the places we were studying.

One system can have extraordinary infrastructure for knowledge.

Another can offer extraordinary proximity to the realities that knowledge is trying to explain.

The best education should probably give us both.

So, where should one study?

I do not tell young people that they should remain in Ghana.

Neither do I romanticise leaving.

Studying abroad transformed me. It expanded my networks, exposed me to different ways of thinking and gave me opportunities I remain deeply grateful for.

Studying in Ghana shaped me differently. It grounded many of the questions I now ask about development in societies I know, among institutions I can observe and within communities whose realities are not merely academic material to me.

My PhD in Ghana therefore does not feel like settling for something less.

For the questions I am currently interested in, being here is itself part of the education.

I can study institutions and walk into them.

I can read about communities and travel to them.

I can interrogate policies whose consequences are unfolding around me.

And I can participate, however modestly, in the very development processes I am trying to understand.

So perhaps we have been asking the wrong question.

The question is not simply:

“Is it better to study in Ghana or abroad?”

Perhaps the better questions are:

What are you trying to learn?

Where can you learn it most meaningfully?

What opportunities and limitations does each environment present?

And, most importantly:

What do you want your education to make possible?

Because education should not merely move us from one geography to another.

At its best, it should expand our world — and then equip us to contribute meaningfully to whichever part of that world we choose to call home.