GNA faces financial turmoil, appeals for urgent govt support
Budget Delays Cripple Ghana News Agency as Attrition Rate Soars
Elohim Nyame 
The Ghana News Agency (GNA) is facing a crippling financial crisis that has led to a high attrition rate among its journalists and staff, management has disclosed.
The state-owned news organisation says the government’s failure to release budgetary allocations for compensation and goods and services in the final quarter of 2024 has severely undermined its operations.
As a result, many reporters who pre-financed coverage of news events last year are yet to be reimbursed, leaving morale at an all-time low.
During a visit by Parliament’s Information and Communication Committee, GNA management made a passionate appeal for urgent intervention to sustain the agency’s operations and preserve its role in Ghana’s media ecosystem.
Director of Editorial, Beatrice Asamani Savage, painted a grim picture of conditions in the newsroom, noting that the existing allowance system was wholly inadequate for fieldwork.
“It is so important that our conditions of service can be improved. Even when you are sending our journalists to the field today, we are anguished because the all-inclusive and out-of-station allowance is GHS280, accommodation, news, and everything,” she lamented.
“They are excited to go, but once they come and you give them the money, they know they can’t sleep in any decent place, let alone feed themselves. So we are actually suffering, but our resilience has kept us. The attrition rate is very high for the journalists and other staff, so we really need your support.”
The Chairman of the Information and Communication Committee of Parliament, Abednego Bandim Azumah, acknowledged the concerns and assured management that some of the issues raised would be relayed to the relevant sector ministers for redress.
The GNA, established in 1957 as the first news agency in Sub-Saharan Africa, has long been a central pillar of Ghana’s media landscape. Its current financial difficulties, however, raise fresh questions about the sustainability of state-owned media institutions in the face of budgetary shortfalls.
