Government Website Development in Ghana: MDA & MMDA Guide

Government website development in Ghana is not the same job as building a website for a shop in Osu, and if you are the IT officer, PRO or procurement lead at a ministry, department, agency or district assembly, you already know why. You are not just worried about how the site looks. You are worried about whether the procurement will survive an audit. Whether the vendor will still be answering the phone in eighteen months. Whether the site will be defaced the week before the minister's press conference. Whether a citizen in Tamale on a cheap Android phone and slow data can actually find the form they need. And whether, when the contract ends, your institution actually owns the thing it paid for.

I'm Dr. Barns, founder of Doctor Barns Tech. We've been building websites and software from Accra since 2018, and one of the live systems on our portfolio is the portal for the EPA Oil and Gas department, the petroleum department of the Environmental Protection Authority. So this guide isn't theory. It's what I'd tell a director over coffee at our studio on New Town Road before they write their terms of reference.

Here's what you'll get: how procurement works for a web project, what the law actually expects from a public website (data protection, cybersecurity, right to information), what accessibility means in practice, where to host, what it should cost, and a step-by-step process you can hand to your tender committee.

What makes government website development in Ghana different?

A government website is a public service, a legal record and a security target all at once. A business site only has to sell. A public site has to inform every citizen equally, publish what the law says must be published, protect the personal data it collects and stand up to people actively trying to break it.

That changes the brief in five concrete ways:

• The buyer is a procurement entity. You can't just pick a developer you like. The Public Procurement Act decides how the vendor is chosen, and your procurement plan, tender documents and evaluation report all become part of the audit trail.
• The audience is everyone. Farmers, students, diaspora Ghanaians, investors, journalists, persons with disabilities, people on 2G in a district capital. "Most of our users have iPhones" is never true for a public body.
• The content is regulated. The Right to Information Act, the Data Protection Act and the Cybersecurity Act all touch what you publish and how you handle data.
• Continuity matters more than launch. Directors change. PROs move to other agencies. Governments change. The website has to outlive every person who commissioned it, which means documentation, handover and ownership are not optional extras.
• The reputational cost of failure is national. A defaced commercial site is embarrassing. A defaced ministry site is a news story.

Public websites rarely fail because of bad design. They failed because nobody wrote these five realities into the terms of reference, so the vendor built a brochure, got paid and vanished.

How does procurement work for a government website in Ghana?

A government website is procured under the Public Procurement Act, 2003 (Act 663) as amended by Act 914, and for public entities the process now runs on GHANEPS, the Ghana Electronic Procurement System. The method you use depends on the value and nature of the contract, and it must appear in your approved procurement plan.

Here's the practical picture, without the legal jargon:

Start with the procurement plan

Section 21 of Act 663 requires every procurement entity to prepare a procurement plan that sets out the contract packages, estimated cost of each, the procurement method and the processing steps and times. If your website isn't in the plan, it isn't happening this year. A common delay is a department that wants a site "before the end of the quarter" but never put it in the plan.

Know the methods the Act allows

Part IV of the Act lists the methods: competitive tendering, two-stage tendering, restricted tendering, single-source procurement and request for quotations. The thresholds that decide which one applies sit in the Act's schedules and are updated from time to time, so your procurement unit, not your vendor, should confirm the right method for your budget.

One point people miss: when you're hiring consultants, section 35(2) points you to the quality and cost-based selection method in Part VI. Whether your website build is treated as a consultancy service or a technical service is a call for your procurement unit and entity tender committee. Get that settled early, because it changes how you evaluate bids. Quality and cost-based selection rewards a strong technical proposal; a pure lowest-price evaluation can push you towards the vendor who left the most out.

Use GHANEPS

The Public Procurement Authority has directed that all public entities use GHANEPS for their procurement, from ministries and MMDAs to state-owned enterprises, health institutions and tertiary institutions. You can read the PPA's notice on the mandatory use of GHANEPS directly. Among the enforcement measures it lists: entities that keep procuring manually can have single-source and restricted tender approval requests held back, and payments are being tied to contracts procured through the system. In 2026 the PPA also publicly reminded entities to upload procurement plans and contract award information to GHANEPS and keep them updated.

For you, that means two things. First, any vendor you want to invite needs to be able to participate on GHANEPS. Second, the paper trail is public by design, so a sloppy evaluation will be visible.

Write a technical specification that protects you

This is where you win or lose. A one-line spec ("design and develop a website for the Assembly") guarantees you'll receive bids that can't be compared. A good spec forces every bidder to price the same thing. I've put a checklist for this further down.

What does the law expect from a public website in Ghana?

Three Acts matter most for a public website: the Data Protection Act, 2012 (Act 843), the Cybersecurity Act, 2020 (Act 1038) and the Right to Information Act, 2019 (Act 989). None of them is a "website law", but each one shapes what your site must do. I'm a developer, not your legal adviser, so treat this as a briefing to take to your legal unit, not as legal advice.

Data Protection Act, 2012 (Act 843)

Every contact form, complaint form, job application portal, newsletter sign-up and permit application collects personal data. Under Act 843 the organisation that decides why and how that data is processed is the data controller. The Data Protection Commission's own compliance guidelines point to section 27, which requires a data controller that intends to process personal data to register with the Commission, and section 50, which requires that registration to be renewed every two years. The guidelines also cover the appointment of a data protection supervisor for medium and large controllers.

What that means for the build:

• Collect only what you need. A "contact us" form doesn't need a Ghana Card number.
• Publish a clear privacy notice that says what you collect, why, how long you keep it and who to contact.
• Encrypt data in transit (HTTPS everywhere) and lock down the admin area.
• Decide retention rules up front, so old applications don't sit in a database forever.
• Make sure your contract with the vendor says the data belongs to the institution and the vendor processes it only on your instructions.

Cybersecurity Act, 2020 (Act 1038)

Act 1038 set up the Cyber Security Authority and created the regime for critical information infrastructure. According to the Cyber Security Authority's CII overview, thirteen sectors were designated as critical by Gazette notice in September 2021. If your system is designated as critical information infrastructure, section 39 requires you to report incidents to the relevant sectoral CERT (or the National CERT) within twenty-four hours of detection, arrange audits and submit the audit report to the Authority.

Even if your website isn't designated CII, section 47 of the Act requires the person in charge of an institution to report a cybersecurity incident to the relevant sectoral CERT or the National CERT within twenty-four hours of detection. A website defacement or a data leak from your contact form counts. So the real question for your vendor is: "If this site is breached at 2am on a Saturday, how will we even know within 24 hours?" If they can't answer with monitoring, alerts and a named person, they're not ready for public sector work.

Right to Information Act, 2019 (Act 989)

Section 3 of Act 989 requires every public institution to compile and publish an up-to-date information manual every twelve months, and to set up an information unit headed by an information officer. Section 23 gives the information officer fourteen days from receipt to decide on an application. Your website is the cheapest, most reliable way to meet the publishing side of this: a permanent RTI page with the current information manual, the information officer's contact details, the application process and a downloadable or online request form.

Build that page in at launch. Retro-fitting it later always gets pushed down the list.

What does accessibility (WCAG) mean for a Ghanaian government site?

Accessibility means a citizen can use your website whatever their ability, device or connection. The international benchmark is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and the current version, WCAG 2.2, became a W3C Recommendation on 5 October 2023, adding nine new success criteria to WCAG 2.1. I recommend writing "conform to WCAG 2.2 Level AA" into your specification.

That sounds abstract, so here is what it looks like on the page:

• Colour contrast strong enough that grey text on a white background is still readable in harsh sunlight on a phone screen.
• Keyboard navigation so a user who can't use a mouse or touchscreen can reach every link and form field, with a visible focus outline.
• Screen reader support: real headings, labelled form fields, meaningful link text and alternative text on images, so a blind user hears "Download the 2026 Composite Budget (PDF)" instead of "read more".
• Target sizes large enough to tap accurately on a small phone.
• Accessible documents: a scanned image of a budget is unreadable to a screen reader and to Google. Publish text-based PDFs or, better, HTML pages.
• Plain language and, where your audience needs it, key notices summarised in local languages.

Accessibility overlaps almost perfectly with performance for low-bandwidth users. A light page that loads fast on 3G in Bolgatanga is usually a well-structured page a screen reader can understand too. You get two wins for one discipline.

Where should a government website be hosted in Ghana?

Host where your institution's policy and your data's sensitivity point you, and get it in writing before the build starts. For many public bodies the first conversation should be with the National Information Technology Agency, whose published services include G-Cloud, government cloud computing for public sector agencies, and the Ghana National Data Centre, which provides hosting, compute, storage and networking for government digital services.

Your realistic options:

Whatever you choose, three non-negotiables: the hosting account and domain are registered to the institution, at least two officers hold the credentials, and backups are stored somewhere other than the server they back up. For your official address, use your institution's .gov.gh domain. Citizens are learning to trust it, and scammers can't easily copy it. If you don't have one yet, ask your IT directorate or NITA about the current process before the build starts, because it can take time.

What features should an MDA or MMDA website have?

An MDA or MMDA website should, at minimum, explain who you are, publish what the law and the public expect, and let citizens do the most common tasks without visiting the office. Everything beyond that should be justified by real demand.

The core every public site needs

• Mandate, leadership and organisational structure (updated when people change, which is the part everyone forgets).
• News, press releases and a notices board with dates, so stale announcements are obvious.
• A document library: budgets, annual reports, policies, Acts and regulations, with search and filters by year and type.
• RTI page with the information manual and information officer details.
• Procurement page linking to your GHANEPS notices, plus downloadable tender documents where appropriate.
• Contact page with Ghana Post GPS address, phone numbers, office hours and a map.
• Privacy notice, accessibility statement and terms of use.

Extra features for MMDAs

• Composite budget and medium-term development plan downloads.
• Assembly members by electoral area, and sub-structure contacts.
• Business operating permit and building permit information, with checklists so applicants arrive with the right documents.
• Revenue and fee schedules, so the market woman knows the official rate.
• Complaint and service request forms (sanitation, streetlights, drainage) routed to the right department with a reference number.

Extra features for regulators and agencies

• Licence and permit application portals with status tracking.
• Public registers that citizens and businesses can search (registered operators, approved products, certified practitioners).
• Payment of fees through your approved revenue collection channel. Our payment integration work starts from GHS 3,000, but for public revenue the channel itself is your finance directorate's decision, not ours.
• Secure document upload with virus scanning and size limits.
• Staff dashboards and audit logs that record who approved what, and when.

That last group is where a "website" becomes a web application. It's the same shift we handled on the EPA Oil and Gas portal, which serves a regulator's petroleum department rather than just publishing pages. When a project reaches that level, I'd point you to our software engineering team because the testing, documentation and handover requirements go up a notch.

How should content be managed on a government website?

Content should be managed by named officers in your institution through a simple content management system, with roles, approvals and a publishing calendar, so the site never depends on the vendor for a press release. If your PRO has to WhatsApp the developer to post a notice, you've bought a dependency, not a website.

What we set up on every public sector build:

1. Roles. Editors draft, approvers publish, administrators manage users. A junior officer should never be able to publish to the home page on their own.
2. Approval workflow. Drafts go to a reviewer before they go live. Every change is logged with a name and a time.
3. Structured content types. A "notice" has a date, an expiry and a department. A "document" has a year, a category and a file. Structure is what makes search and filters work.
4. Training and a written guide. We train your team at handover and leave a short manual in plain English, so a new PRO can learn the system without calling us.
5. A content calendar. Budgets, annual reports and the RTI manual have predictable dates. Put reminders in the calendar so the site never shows last year's figures.

One more thing: good structure is also how your institution shows up in Google and in AI answers. When a citizen asks ChatGPT or Gemini "how do I get a building permit in my district", the answer comes from pages that are clear, current and well structured. We've written about this in our guide to optimising for AI search, and the same principles apply to public information.

How much does government website development in Ghana cost?

A government website built by Doctor Barns Tech starts from GHS 6,000 for a focused information portal, from GHS 15,000 for a portal with online forms and e-services, and from GHS 50,000 for an integrated enterprise platform. The figure depends on page count, integrations, number of user roles and how much content migration and training you need.

Here's how that maps to real public sector projects, using our published price floors:

Two honest notes. First, an information portal for a public body almost always needs more than our base business package. Accessibility testing, a properly built document library, RTI pages and role-based publishing all add scope, so expect a specific quote above the floor once we see your terms of reference. Second, a starting price is a floor, not a promise. If anyone quotes you a fixed figure for a public portal without seeing your requirements, ask them what they've assumed.

On payment: our standard terms are 50% upfront and 50% on launch, and projects above GHS 30,000 can run as 40/30/30 milestones. For public sector contracts we work to the payment terms agreed in the contract, so raise this at the clarification stage. Payments can be made by bank transfer, Mobile Money or card. For commercial domains and hosting, the first year is included with website packages, with renewals from GHS 300 a year for hosting and GHS 80 a year for a domain. If you host on government infrastructure, those renewal costs are replaced by whatever arrangement you have with the host.

What cheap government website quotes usually leave out

• Accessibility testing (not "we used a nice template").
• Content migration from the old site, including every PDF somebody will ask for after launch.
• Security hardening, monitoring and an incident response plan that fits the 24-hour reporting rule.
• Backups that are tested, not just switched on.
• Training for more than one officer, and a written manual.
• Handover of source code, admin credentials and documentation.
• Support after launch. Most sites break, or get attacked, in the first three months.

If you want the broader picture of what websites cost in Ghana outside the public sector, our Ghana website cost breakdown lays it out by type.

Step-by-step: how to deliver a government website project

The safest way to deliver a public website is to treat it as eight stages, each with a named owner and a document at the end. Here's the sequence I recommend to directors and IT officers.

1. Needs assessment (week 0). List your audiences, the top ten things citizens contact you about and the documents you're legally required to publish. Pull your current site's analytics if you have them. This becomes the core of your specification.
2. Procurement plan and budget. Confirm the project is in your approved procurement plan with a realistic estimated cost. Agree the procurement method with your procurement unit.
3. Terms of reference and technical specification. Use the checklist below. Specify WCAG 2.2 AA, data ownership, hosting, security expectations, training and support periods, and deliverables at each milestone.
4. Tender and evaluation on GHANEPS. Evaluate technical proposals seriously: ask for live examples of similar public or regulated work, a named project lead, a delivery plan and a security approach. Ask shortlisted firms to demo their content management system.
5. Discovery and design (weeks 1–3). The vendor maps the sitemap, content types and user journeys, then presents designs for approval. Test designs with a few real users, including someone using a screen reader and someone on a low-end phone.
6. Build and content migration (weeks 3–10 for most portals). Weekly demos on a staging site. Your team should be loading real content into the CMS during this stage, not after it.
7. Testing and security review. Accessibility checks, cross-device testing, speed tests on a throttled connection, form and permission testing, backup and restore test, and a basic vulnerability scan. Fix everything before launch, not "in phase two".
8. Launch, training and handover. Go live, set up redirects from old URLs so you keep your Google rankings, train officers, hand over credentials, source code and documentation, and start the support period. We cover the redirect side in detail in our guide to redesigning a website without losing rankings.

Technical specification checklist for your tender documents

Copy this into your terms of reference and ask every bidder to respond to each line. It makes bids comparable and protects you after award.

• Conformance target: WCAG 2.2 Level AA, with an accessibility statement published on the site.
• Mobile-first design tested on low-end Android devices and slow connections, with a page-weight budget for the home page.
• Content management system with role-based access, approval workflow and audit log.
• HTTPS across the whole site, security headers, hardened admin login with two-factor authentication.
• Monitoring and alerting for downtime and defacement, with a named contact and response times.
• Daily automated backups stored off-server, with a restore test before launch.
• Privacy notice and data handling aligned to Act 843; the institution is the data controller and owns all data.
• RTI page with information manual, information officer contact and request process.
• Integration with GHANEPS notices or a procurement page linking to them.
• Search across pages and documents, with filters by year and category.
• SEO basics: clean URLs, page titles, structured data, XML sitemap, Google Search Console set up under an institutional account.
• Training for at least three officers, plus a written user manual.
• Full handover: source code, database, admin credentials, hosting and domain access, documentation.
• Support period with defined response times, and a priced option for ongoing maintenance.

Is a custom build or a template better for a government website?

For a small unit with a simple information need, a well-configured CMS on a solid, accessible theme can be enough. For anything with forms, applications, registers, multiple departments or sensitive data, a custom build is safer, because you control the code, the security and the data model rather than depending on a stack of third-party plugins.

Neither choice is right for everyone. What matters is that you choose deliberately and write the choice into the specification, instead of finding out after award which one you bought.

How do you keep a government website secure after launch?

You keep a government website secure by treating security as a monthly routine, not a launch task: updates, monitoring, backups, access reviews and a tested incident plan. Public site defacements commonly trace back to an unpatched plugin or an old admin account nobody removed.

The routine I recommend:

• Monthly: apply security updates, review admin accounts (remove officers who've been transferred), check backup logs, review uptime and error reports.
• Quarterly: run a vulnerability scan, test a backup restore, review the privacy notice and RTI page for accuracy.
• Annually: update the RTI information manual, renew certificates, domains and hosting, and do a full accessibility re-check after a year of new content.
• Always: know who reports an incident to the CERT, and how, within 24 hours.

We've published a plain-language list of cybersecurity habits for Ghanaian organisations that your IT unit can adapt, and our guide to what website maintenance costs explains what a sensible support arrangement covers.

Why choose Doctor Barns Tech for a government website?

I believe we're the best web development company in Ghana for public sector work, and I'd rather give you reasons you can check than ask you to take my word for it.

• Live regulated work you can visit. The EPA Oil and Gas portal for the Environmental Protection Authority's petroleum department is on our portfolio of live projects, alongside regulated-sector clients like Hollard Ghana and SIC Insurance PLC.
• Published price floors. Our prices are on our website. Your tender committee can sanity-check a bid against them before the evaluation meeting.
• You own everything. Code, content, domain and data are the institution's. We hand over credentials and documentation at launch.
• An Accra studio you can walk into. 111 New Town Rd, Accra, Monday to Friday 9:00–18:00 and Saturday 10:00–14:00. Assemblies and agencies in Kumasi, Tema, Takoradi and Tamale work with us by video call and WhatsApp.
• Accessibility, security and handover priced up front. They go into our proposal from day one, not sold back to you later as change requests.
• Full-stack capability. When an information site needs to grow into an e-services platform, the same team builds it. See our government and public sector page and our web development services for the detail.

The risk reversal is simple: every milestone is demonstrated on a staging site before it's signed off, and you never pay the final instalment until the site is live and your officers are trained.

Common mistakes MDAs and MMDAs make with websites

The most expensive mistakes happen before a single line of code is written. Here are the ones I see most often:

• The domain or hosting registered in a former staff member's name. When they leave, the institution is locked out of its own website.
• No budget line for year two. The site launches, nobody pays for maintenance, and twelve months later it's showing an expired security certificate.
• Uploading scanned images of documents. They're unreadable to screen readers and invisible to Google.
• A home page built around the director's photo instead of the citizen's top tasks.
• Launching without redirects from the old site, so every link in old news articles and Google results breaks overnight.
• One person holding all the passwords. Always at least two officers, stored in a password manager.
• Treating the vendor as the content team. Your officers must be able to publish without calling anyone.

Fix those seven and you're ahead of most public websites in the country.

Ready to plan your project?

If you're drafting terms of reference, preparing a budget estimate for your procurement plan or trying to rescue a site that's already in trouble, I'm happy to walk your team through it, at our Accra studio or by video. Bring your current site, your mandate and your list of the top ten citizen requests, and we'll tell you honestly what scope and budget make sense. Book a consultation with Doctor Barns Tech or call or WhatsApp +233 20 963 6158 to get practical, procurement-ready advice on government website development in Ghana.