Walk into most public libraries in Ghana on a weekday afternoon and you’ll find the same scene: a librarian at the front desk, rows of quiet shelves, and maybe a handful of JHS students cramming for an exam they can’t avoid.
What you won’t find, in most cases, is a young person there because they wanted to be. Meanwhile, on the trotro home, on the walk to the market, in the five minutes before class starts, that same young person is on a phone – not doing anything wrong, just doing what everyone their age is doing. Scrolling.
This isn’t a new observation. Ghana’s officials have been saying versions of it for over a year now. Education Minister, Haruna Iddrisu, told the Public Accounts Committee in late 2025 that the country’s reading habit have been deteriorating, contrasting it with what he sees on trips abroad, where people fill their mornings with newspapers.
Earlier this year, at the inaugural Ghana Literacy Fair in Accra, education officials described the situation more starkly – as a reading crisis, with national and international assessments showing many Ghanaian children failing to acquire basic literacy skills in their earliest years of school.
The Tourism, Culture and Creative Arts Minister, Dzifa Gomashie, has called for a coordinated national effort to revive reading among the young. The Ghana Library Authority itself has publicly flagged declining library use.
What’s missing from most of this conversation is the harder question underneath the hand-wringing: why, exactly, is this happening, and why do the responses so far look like they’re going to keep not working?
The easy answer is also the least useful one ‘Kids are on their phones now’ is true, and it is also not an explanation.
Phones didn’t invent distraction; they just made it portable, constant and algorithmically optimised to hold attention better than a paperback ever could.
Blaming the smartphone is emotionally satisfying but strategically useless, because nobody is taking phones away from an entire generation, nor should they try.
The more honest question is why reading has so little pull against a phone’s gravity in the first place – and that has less to do with willpower than with infrastructure.
Ghana’s public library network currently runs to roughly 139 libraries nationwide. For a country of over 30 million people, spread across sixteen regions and hundreds of districts, that is a thin, uneven footprint – concentrated in urban centres, sparse or absent in many rural and peri-urban communities.
A child in a well-served Accra suburb might have a library a short walk away; a child two hours outside a regional capital may have never set foot in one.
When access to books requires effort, cost, or a long journey, and access to a screen requires none of those things, the outcome isn’t a mystery. It’s basic behavioural economics. Reading isn’t losing to TikTok because TikTok is more compelling than a good story – it’s losing because a good story is so much harder to get to.
The response so far treats a structural problem like a motivational one.
Look at what’s actually been tried. A Holiday Reading Challenge asking learners to complete six books over a school break. A one-day Literacy Fair with a reading marathon and storytelling sessions. Courtesy calls and ministerial statements urging ‘coordinated national efforts.’
These are not bad ideas – they’re genuinely well-intentioned, and the people running them, from the Ghana Library Authority’s regional librarians to civil society partners like Brighter Future Africa, are doing real work with limited resources. But notice the shape of these interventions: they are events.
Campaigns. Seasonal pushes. A reading culture built entirely out of campaigns is a reading culture that exists for six weeks in the summer and disappears the rest of the year, because nothing about the daily infrastructure of a child’s life changed once the campaign ended.
Contrast that with what actually built reading habits in the countries Ghanaian officials point to when they lament what they see ‘abroad’: embedded, boring, unglamorous structural features – a library or a bookshelf within easy reach of nearly every school, dedicated reading periods built into the timetable rather than left to extracurricular enthusiasm, and – the part that gets skipped most often – adults who visibly read in front of children, at home, not just in a classroom.
Meeting the screen instead of fighting it
There is one genuinely promising shift buried in recent reporting: the Ghana Library Authority has talked about using technology itself to win back younger readers, rather than treating phones purely as the enemy. That’s the right instinct, and it deserves to be central rather than an afterthought.
A teenager who won’t walk to a library after school might read on a phone during the twenty idle minutes he already spends on it daily, if the content is there, in a language and format he’d actually choose – audiobooks, serialised fiction apps, local-language digital libraries, WhatsApp-distributed short stories.
Fighting for a child’s attention against a screen is a losing battle. Fighting for it through the same screen is at least a fair fight.
What would actually move the number
None of the individual interventions on the table right now – the readathons, the fairs, the ministerial statements – are wrong. What’s missing is permanence. A national reading period embedded in the school day, not bolted onto the holidays. Corporate partners adopting specific under-resourced libraries the way some have started to, with sustained funding rather than one-off donations.
A serious, funded push to put reading content on the platforms young people are already using instead of only trying to pull them away from those platforms. And a basic, unglamorous expansion of the physical library network itself, because no campaign fixes a shortage of buildings.
The libraries aren’t failing because nobody in Ghana wants young people to read. Everyone quoted in this piece wants exactly that.
They’re failing because access, habit, and daily infrastructure were never built at the scale the problem demands – and campaigns, however well-meaning, cannot substitute for infrastructure. Until that changes, the doors will keep opening every morning onto quiet, half-empty rooms.