Ghana does not have a Sex Offenders Register. Schools, children's homes, hospitals and care facilities across the country hire staff every day without the single database that almost every comparable country considers fundamental to protecting children and vulnerable adults from harm.
The Register Ghana Does Not Have.
This is a brief about the silence in Ghana's child and vulnerable-adult protection architecture — and about what organisations can do, today, to close that gap while the national infrastructure is still being built. It draws on the working models of South Africa, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Nigeria. And it proposes a private-sector safeguarding standard that Ghana's responsible employers can implement now, without waiting for the law to catch up.
A Protection Register That Does Not Exist
In August 2020, the Domestic Violence and Victims Support Unit (DOVVSU) of the Ghana Police Service publicly announced that the country would establish a Sex Offenders Register — to serve as a national reference point for the protection of children and vulnerable adults. The announcement was welcomed. Years on, the register remains on the drawing board. No public database exists. No employer of teachers, caregivers, or domestic staff in Ghana can check a candidate's name against a national list of persons convicted of sexual offences against children or vulnerable adults, because that list does not exist in an accessible form.
This is not a technical detail. It is a structural gap in Ghana's safeguarding architecture that has consequences every day — in schools, children's homes, hospitals, places of worship, and private households where vulnerable people are cared for by adults whose history cannot be independently verified against the single record that matters most.
"We don't have one specifically for rape convicts, but we intend to do that going forward. It is on the drawing board, to establish a register for people who have been convicted of rape which among other things is to serve as a reference point."— Chief Superintendent Owusua Kyeremeh, National Coordinator, DOVVSU, August 2020
Average annual incidence rate of recorded child rape per 100,000 girls up to age 19 in Ghana, 2010–2014, according to the Domestic Violence and Victims Support Unit. Reported cases only. The actual rate is widely believed to be many times higher.
A Plan Ghana study conducted in Awutu Senya, Effutu and Upper Manya Krobo Districts found that approximately 14% of female students and 10% of male students reported having been sexually abused — by classmates, teachers, and relatives.
Among survivors in the Plan Ghana study who identified their abusers, 21% named teachers as among the perpetrators. Teachers sit alongside classmates, neighbours, and relatives as the adults children most commonly report having been abused by.
Statistics on sexual offences are notoriously under-reported everywhere in the world. In Ghana — where stigma, family pressure to withdraw complaints, long-delayed justice and limited institutional response frequently discourage reporting — the true scale is almost certainly a significant multiple of what is recorded. OSG cites only figures that have been independently documented by Ghana Police, DOVVSU, or peer-reviewed academic research. Where numbers are uncertain, we say so. The underlying reality is not uncertain: the gap between recorded cases and actual incidence is wide, and the recorded cases alone are more than sufficient to justify comprehensive safeguarding screening.
A Police Clearance Certificate Is
Not a Safeguarding Check.
Every school, children's home, hospital, rehabilitation centre, boarding house, Sunday school, and high-net-worth household in Ghana relies — at the point of hiring — on a Ghana Police Criminal Records Bureau clearance, a reference letter, and a CV. This is the safeguarding infrastructure. None of these instruments is designed to do what a Sex Offenders Register or a Barred List does. The gap between what these instruments provide and what safeguarding actually requires is the gap in which harm to vulnerable people is enabled.
Not Concerns, Referrals, or Barring.
A Ghana Police clearance certificate confirms whether the individual has a recorded criminal conviction. It does not capture: allegations that were investigated but not prosecuted; safeguarding referrals made by previous employers; disciplinary findings by professional bodies; dismissals for conduct concerns; or concerns raised by children, parents, or other staff that never reached the criminal justice system. In the UK system, most people barred from working with children were barred on the basis of non-conviction information — safeguarding referrals and disciplinary findings. That entire category of risk is invisible to a Ghana police clearance.
The pattern is documented across every jurisdiction that has studied institutional abuse. An individual dismissed from one school for conduct concerns — without a criminal conviction — simply applies for a post at the next school, where the concerns are invisible. Without a national register or barred list, nothing in the hiring process is designed to detect this pattern. In the United States, the Government Accountability Office documented 15 cases of individuals with histories of sexual misconduct who were hired or retained by public and private schools as teachers, administrators, and volunteers — specifically because the safeguarding information was not systematically captured and made accessible to employers.
Ghana hosts significant numbers of foreign nationals working in education, healthcare, religious institutions, development agencies, and private care. A Ghana police clearance captures convictions within Ghana. It does not capture convictions in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa, or any other jurisdiction. An individual barred from working with children in their country of origin can — unless specifically asked and their answer independently verified — secure a position in Ghana working with children, without the red flag ever surfacing.
Teaching qualifications, nursing licences, social work certifications, and childcare credentials are frequently fabricated or fraudulently obtained in Ghana — a pattern OSG has covered in prior briefs. The individual presenting themselves as a qualified teacher or caregiver may not only lack legitimate credentials but may have been struck off or disciplined under a different name or a prior credential. Without source verification and — where professional regulation exists — a direct check against the regulatory body, the person standing in front of a child or a vulnerable adult may be someone entirely different from the person the CV describes.
The absence of a Sex Offenders Register in Ghana is not a reason to lower the safeguarding standard. It is a reason to raise the rigour of the due diligence that employers in care settings apply — because the national safety net most countries rely on simply is not there to catch the person who slips through. The burden of protection falls on the employer, the school, the home, the hospital, the household — and on the professional firms they engage to do what the state is not yet equipped to do.
How Other Countries
Have Built This.
Ghana is not the first country to recognise that a fragmented approach to safeguarding puts children and vulnerable adults at risk. The countries below have each, over decades and in response to specific national incidents, built structured systems that either register sex offenders or actively bar unsuitable persons from working with vulnerable people. Each model has strengths and weaknesses. Together, they provide a clear picture of what the state-level infrastructure can look like — and what, in the interim, Ghanaian organisations can adapt into their own private-sector safeguarding practice.
South Africa's NRSO was established by an Act of Parliament in 2007 and expanded in 2021 to cover offences against all vulnerable persons, not only children and persons with mental disabilities. The register is a record of names of those found guilty of sexual offences against vulnerable persons — whether the offence was committed inside or outside South Africa. It creates a legal obligation on employers in both the public and private sector to check whether a person being hired is fit to work with vulnerable people.
As of early 2025, the register held 32,501 active offenders, with a further 10,325 under consideration for inclusion. Individuals listed on the NRSO are barred from employment giving access to vulnerable persons, and are prohibited from fostering or adopting children. The register is not currently open to the general public — a matter of active legislative debate in South Africa — but is accessible to employers under a controlled procedure. A parallel National Child Protection Register operates under the Children's Act of 2005 and maintains Part B: persons found by a court to be unsuitable to work with children.
The UK's Disclosure and Barring Service is arguably the most developed safeguarding vetting system in operation. It was formed in 2012 by merging the Criminal Records Bureau and the Independent Safeguarding Authority. The DBS does two things: it provides four tiers of criminal record disclosure, and it maintains two Barred Lists — the Children's Barred List and the Adults' Barred List. A person on either Barred List is legally prohibited from working in "regulated activity" with that group, and it is a criminal offence for an employer to knowingly employ a barred person in regulated activity.
The Enhanced DBS Check — required for teachers, healthcare staff, childcare workers, and anyone working with vulnerable groups — includes criminal conviction history, cautions, and non-conviction information held by relevant police forces that the Chief Police Officer considers should be disclosed. Employers, regulatory bodies, and volunteer managers have a legal duty to refer to DBS any safeguarding concern that meets the threshold, meaning the system captures concerns that never reach the criminal justice system.
Australia operates a state-based system of Working with Children Checks — a mandatory, portable, employee-held clearance that allows the holder to engage in child-related work. Each state maintains its own check (WWCC in New South Wales and Victoria, Blue Card in Queensland, Working with Vulnerable People Check in ACT) but the underlying principle is consistent: the individual, not the employer, holds the check; the check is rigorous and periodic; and the check is a legal precondition to child-related work.
A Working with Children Check assesses national criminal history, findings of professional misconduct, reportable conduct — including misconduct that did not result in a criminal conviction — and any disciplinary information held by professional regulators. The system includes continuous monitoring: if relevant new information emerges during the validity period of a check, the check can be revoked. Crucially, the individual carries their clearance across employers — reducing the friction of recruitment while maintaining the protective standard. This is a model particularly well-suited to jurisdictions with large informal or self-employed caregiving sectors.
Nigeria's Sex Offenders Database is operated by the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP) and was established to document reported, arraigned, and convicted sex offences as defined under the Violence Against Persons (Prohibition) Act 2015. The register is notable in the African context for being partially publicly accessible: data on those convicted is available directly on the NSOD website, while data on reported or arraigned but not yet convicted cases is available on a controlled-access basis.
The Nigerian model is particularly useful as a reference for Ghana because of the shared regional context, comparable legal tradition, and the practical design choice to make conviction data public while protecting non-conviction data through controlled access. The register also operates a parallel registry of service providers and NGOs that offer safeguarding services — a feature relevant to Ghana as the domestic safeguarding ecosystem develops. The Nigerian experience demonstrates that West African jurisdictions can operate functional sex offender registers; the absence of one in Ghana is not a regional inevitability.
Across every working model — South Africa, the UK, Australia, Nigeria, and numerous others — three features recur. First, the system captures non-conviction information: safeguarding concerns, disciplinary findings, and protective barrings that never reached the criminal courts. Second, there is a legal obligation on employers in regulated activity to check against the register or barred list before appointment. Third, there are periodic updates — the system does not treat a single clean check as a permanent clearance. Every feature addresses a specific failure mode that a simple criminal record check cannot address. And every feature is implementable, in some form, inside a private-sector safeguarding framework even before national legislation catches up.
The Sectors Where Ghana's
Safeguarding Silence Matters Most
In each of the following sectors, children or vulnerable adults are placed daily in the care of adults whose full safeguarding history cannot currently be verified in Ghana. Each of these sectors is a place where the responsible employer should be applying a standard of pre-appointment and periodic screening that compensates for the absence of national infrastructure.
Basic schools, junior and senior high schools, boarding houses, private international schools, tuition and extra-curricular providers, sports coaches, music and arts instructors, boarding-house masters and mistresses. Every adult with sustained access to children in an educational capacity. Ghana's Plan Ghana research identifies teachers as among the top-reported perpetrators of sexual abuse in school settings.
Residential care providers, orphanages, group homes, rehabilitation facilities for children, transitional homes. Children in residential care are among the most vulnerable in any society — separated from family networks, often traumatised before arrival, and dependent on institutional staff for basic protection. The screening standard for residential childcare personnel must be uncompromising.
Paediatric and maternity wards, mental health facilities, special-needs care providers, facilities serving elderly or cognitively impaired patients. Healthcare staff routinely have intimate access to vulnerable patients with limited capacity to report harm. The combination of physical access, psychological authority, and diminished capacity to report makes this a category requiring enhanced safeguarding rigour.
Churches, mosques, Sunday schools, youth fellowships, religious camps, choirs, religious boarding programmes. Institutional religious settings have historically been among the environments where safeguarding failures have produced some of the most serious documented cases of institutional abuse worldwide. Ghana's religious institutions are no exception to the pattern, and the safeguarding standard applied should not be either.
House-helps, nannies, drivers, security personnel, gardeners, tutors, and private caregivers working inside the homes of high-net-worth families in Accra, Kumasi, Takoradi, and the diaspora's Ghanaian bases. The private household is the least-regulated safeguarding environment of all — and often the one with the longest, most intimate, and most unsupervised access to children and vulnerable elders.
Football academies, martial arts instructors, dance teachers, music tutors, drama coaches, scouts and youth movement leaders, summer camp operators. Adult-child relationships built on mentorship, physical contact, and out-of-school authority. Globally, extracurricular settings have produced a disproportionate share of documented abuse cases — because the adult enjoys authority without the institutional scrutiny of a school.
Whose Protection This Brief
Is Actually About
The analytical case for comprehensive safeguarding screening is made throughout this brief in institutional and operational terms. But the institutions and operations exist for one purpose only: to protect specific categories of human beings whose vulnerability the rest of us are collectively responsible for addressing.
Every child in a Ghanaian classroom, hostel, boarding house, or after-school programme — who has no means of independently verifying that the adult in front of them is fit to be there.
Every child in an orphanage, a children's home, a rehabilitation centre, a foster arrangement — children already made vulnerable by circumstance, for whom institutional protection is the primary safety net.
Adults with intellectual or cognitive disabilities, elderly patients with dementia, psychiatric inpatients, and individuals under sedation or post-operative care — whose capacity to report harm is itself compromised.
The child in a household where domestic staff have sustained, unsupervised, intimate access — where the employer's due diligence is often the only line of protection, and where the consequence of its absence is measured in a child's life.
"Vulnerable children and adults in Ghana are protected today by the goodwill of responsible employers, the diligence of individual caregivers, and the presence of family members watching. They are not protected by a system. Until they are, the responsible employer must become the system."— OSG Intelligence Brief 12
What OSG Offers in the Absence
of a National Register
OSG has designed a comprehensive safeguarding assessment framework specifically calibrated for the Ghanaian context — for employers in education, care, healthcare, religious institutions, domestic households, and youth programmes who cannot wait for national infrastructure to close the gap. The framework incorporates the operational lessons of the South African NRSO, the UK DBS, the Australian WWCC, and the Nigerian NSOD, adapted for the specific instruments and records available in Ghana today.
Beyond the standard Ghana Police clearance, OSG conducts enhanced inquiry with the Domestic Violence and Victims Support Unit (where legal consent permits), with the Ghana Education Service for teacher disciplinary records, with the Nurses and Midwifery Council of Ghana and the Medical and Dental Council for health professional conduct records, and with the Department of Social Welfare where foster or childcare licensing exists. Where the candidate has lived or worked abroad, OSG conducts parallel inquiry with equivalent bodies in those jurisdictions.
OSG contacts each previous employer directly, with specific focus on the safeguarding-relevant questions that reference letters rarely address: was the candidate ever the subject of a safeguarding concern or complaint? was the candidate ever asked to leave a post on conduct grounds, even if the departure was framed as voluntary? was the candidate ever moved away from direct access to children or vulnerable adults while employed? The answers surface patterns that a conventional reference check will not detect.
Teaching qualifications verified with the Ghana Education Service and the relevant colleges of education at source, not against copies supplied by the candidate. Nursing and allied health qualifications verified directly with the Nurses and Midwifery Council. Social work qualifications verified with the relevant regulatory body. Foreign qualifications verified at source with the originating institution — not merely authenticated by a stamp on a photocopy.
For roles with sustained direct access to children or vulnerable adults, OSG's psychological fitness assessment applies internationally validated instruments — including integrity psychometrics and clinical suitability assessment — to identify personality configurations and risk indicators associated with safeguarding failure. This is the same category of assessment that leading international safeguarding systems apply to the most sensitive care-giving roles.
Comprehensive adverse media review across Ghanaian, regional, and international sources — picking up press reports of disciplinary actions, investigations, or concerns that may never have resulted in formal conviction. Digital footprint analysis. And — within the bounds of legal consent and Ghana's Data Protection Act — discreet community-level enquiry in the candidate's home and professional community to surface the concerns that paper records often do not capture.
A single pre-appointment screen is not sufficient. OSG offers an annual re-screening programme for safeguarding-critical roles — matching the international standard, in which the adult who was cleared last year is re-verified this year, because circumstances change and new information emerges. Client employers receive a confidential safeguarding status report that allows them to meet their own governance and reputational obligations.
When assembled into an integrated safeguarding screening package, the OSG framework produces — in the Ghanaian context — an approximation of what a DBS Enhanced Check with Barred List verification delivers in the United Kingdom, or what a working WWCC clearance delivers in Australia. It is not a substitute for national infrastructure, and OSG publicly supports the establishment of a Ghana Sex Offenders Register as a matter of national priority. But in the meantime, it is the closest equivalent available to employers who are not willing to wait, and whose duty to the children and vulnerable adults in their care does not permit them to wait.
The Standard Ghana's Schools,
Care Facilities and Households Can Adopt Now
This brief is addressed to decision-makers: heads of schools, directors of children's homes, managing directors of hospitals, chairpersons of religious organisations, heads of household, and the boards that oversee them. The actions below are within the reach of any responsible employer, and do not require a change in national legislation to implement.
For Schools & Educational Institutions
Adopt a written safeguarding policy that applies to every appointment with access to students — teachers, boarders' masters, drivers, cleaners, security, external coaches. Require enhanced screening beyond police clearance for all appointments, calibrated to the specific safeguarding risk of the role. Implement annual re-screening for permanent staff. Maintain an internal safeguarding log. Train all staff on recognising and reporting safeguarding concerns. Require the same standard from external contractors.
For Children's Homes & Residential Care
Apply the highest level of safeguarding screening to every member of staff, resident volunteer, trustee, and regular visitor. Implement psychological fitness assessment for all care-giving roles. Maintain an independent safeguarding officer with direct reporting to the Board. Conduct quarterly reviews of the safeguarding log. Treat a single substantiated concern as a mandatory cause for dismissal, not a reputational problem to be contained.
For Hospitals & Healthcare Facilities
Require credential verification at source with the Nurses and Midwifery Council, the Medical and Dental Council, and equivalent foreign bodies for every clinical appointment. Apply enhanced safeguarding screening to staff working in paediatrics, maternity, mental health, geriatric care, and disability services. Maintain a named safeguarding lead within the facility. Implement mandatory safeguarding training for all staff — clinical and non-clinical alike.
For High-Net-Worth Households
Apply professional safeguarding screening to every member of domestic staff who will have direct or unsupervised access to children, elderly, or cognitively impaired family members. This is the single most important due diligence step a family can take, and the one most often skipped. OSG's Domestic Staff Screening package is designed precisely for this purpose and operates under strict confidentiality and Ghana Data Protection Act compliance.
Comprehensive safeguarding screening in Ghana — including enhanced regulatory inquiry, safeguarding-specific reference checks, credential source verification, psychological assessment, and adverse media review — costs between GHS 1,800 and GHS 4,500 per candidate depending on role and risk profile. This is not a trivial sum. It is, however, materially less than the cost of a single safeguarding incident — measured in harm to the child or vulnerable adult, in legal exposure to the institution, and in the reputational destruction that follows even one substantiated case. The cost of not screening is not a saving.
The Responsibility Is
Not Optional.
A national Sex Offenders Register for Ghana is a worthy goal, and OSG supports every serious effort to establish one. But that advocacy cannot become an excuse for inaction at the institutional level. Every day that responsible employers continue to hire for safeguarding-critical roles using only a police clearance certificate is a day on which Ghana's children and vulnerable adults are less protected than they would be under almost any comparable national framework.
The gap cannot be closed tomorrow by the state. It can be closed today, one employer at a time, by the institutions and households that understand what is at stake — and that refuse to outsource a duty they cannot delegate.
"The absence of a national register is not the end of the safeguarding argument. It is the beginning of the responsible employer's duty to build the protection that the state has not yet built."— OSG Intelligence Brief 12
Build Your Safeguarding Standard
Before You Need It.
Commission OSG's Safeguarding Screening for your school, care facility, hospital, or household. Or request a confidential Safeguarding Audit of your current hiring and monitoring practice — identifying where your specific organisation sits against international best practice and what needs to change.
Commission Safeguarding Screening Request a Safeguarding AuditGhana does not have a Sex Offenders Register. Schools, children's homes, hospitals and care facilities across the country hire staff every day without the single database that almost every comparable country considers fundamental to protecting children and vulnerable adults from harm.
The Register Ghana Does Not Have.
This is a brief about the silence in Ghana's child and vulnerable-adult protection architecture — and about what organisations can do, today, to close that gap while the national infrastructure is still being built. It draws on the working models of South Africa, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Nigeria. And it proposes a private-sector safeguarding standard that Ghana's responsible employers can implement now, without waiting for the law to catch up.
A Protection Register That Does Not Exist
In August 2020, the Domestic Violence and Victims Support Unit (DOVVSU) of the Ghana Police Service publicly announced that the country would establish a Sex Offenders Register — to serve as a national reference point for the protection of children and vulnerable adults. The announcement was welcomed. Years on, the register remains on the drawing board. No public database exists. No employer of teachers, caregivers, or domestic staff in Ghana can check a candidate's name against a national list of persons convicted of sexual offences against children or vulnerable adults, because that list does not exist in an accessible form.
This is not a technical detail. It is a structural gap in Ghana's safeguarding architecture that has consequences every day — in schools, children's homes, hospitals, places of worship, and private households where vulnerable people are cared for by adults whose history cannot be independently verified against the single record that matters most.
"We don't have one specifically for rape convicts, but we intend to do that going forward. It is on the drawing board, to establish a register for people who have been convicted of rape which among other things is to serve as a reference point."— Chief Superintendent Owusua Kyeremeh, National Coordinator, DOVVSU, August 2020
Average annual incidence rate of recorded child rape per 100,000 girls up to age 19 in Ghana, 2010–2014, according to the Domestic Violence and Victims Support Unit. Reported cases only. The actual rate is widely believed to be many times higher.
A Plan Ghana study conducted in Awutu Senya, Effutu and Upper Manya Krobo Districts found that approximately 14% of female students and 10% of male students reported having been sexually abused — by classmates, teachers, and relatives.
Among survivors in the Plan Ghana study who identified their abusers, 21% named teachers as among the perpetrators. Teachers sit alongside classmates, neighbours, and relatives as the adults children most commonly report having been abused by.
Statistics on sexual offences are notoriously under-reported everywhere in the world. In Ghana — where stigma, family pressure to withdraw complaints, long-delayed justice and limited institutional response frequently discourage reporting — the true scale is almost certainly a significant multiple of what is recorded. OSG cites only figures that have been independently documented by Ghana Police, DOVVSU, or peer-reviewed academic research. Where numbers are uncertain, we say so. The underlying reality is not uncertain: the gap between recorded cases and actual incidence is wide, and the recorded cases alone are more than sufficient to justify comprehensive safeguarding screening.
A Police Clearance Certificate Is
Not a Safeguarding Check.
Every school, children's home, hospital, rehabilitation centre, boarding house, Sunday school, and high-net-worth household in Ghana relies — at the point of hiring — on a Ghana Police Criminal Records Bureau clearance, a reference letter, and a CV. This is the safeguarding infrastructure. None of these instruments is designed to do what a Sex Offenders Register or a Barred List does. The gap between what these instruments provide and what safeguarding actually requires is the gap in which harm to vulnerable people is enabled.
Not Concerns, Referrals, or Barring.
A Ghana Police clearance certificate confirms whether the individual has a recorded criminal conviction. It does not capture: allegations that were investigated but not prosecuted; safeguarding referrals made by previous employers; disciplinary findings by professional bodies; dismissals for conduct concerns; or concerns raised by children, parents, or other staff that never reached the criminal justice system. In the UK system, most people barred from working with children were barred on the basis of non-conviction information — safeguarding referrals and disciplinary findings. That entire category of risk is invisible to a Ghana police clearance.
The pattern is documented across every jurisdiction that has studied institutional abuse. An individual dismissed from one school for conduct concerns — without a criminal conviction — simply applies for a post at the next school, where the concerns are invisible. Without a national register or barred list, nothing in the hiring process is designed to detect this pattern. In the United States, the Government Accountability Office documented 15 cases of individuals with histories of sexual misconduct who were hired or retained by public and private schools as teachers, administrators, and volunteers — specifically because the safeguarding information was not systematically captured and made accessible to employers.
Ghana hosts significant numbers of foreign nationals working in education, healthcare, religious institutions, development agencies, and private care. A Ghana police clearance captures convictions within Ghana. It does not capture convictions in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa, or any other jurisdiction. An individual barred from working with children in their country of origin can — unless specifically asked and their answer independently verified — secure a position in Ghana working with children, without the red flag ever surfacing.
Teaching qualifications, nursing licences, social work certifications, and childcare credentials are frequently fabricated or fraudulently obtained in Ghana — a pattern OSG has covered in prior briefs. The individual presenting themselves as a qualified teacher or caregiver may not only lack legitimate credentials but may have been struck off or disciplined under a different name or a prior credential. Without source verification and — where professional regulation exists — a direct check against the regulatory body, the person standing in front of a child or a vulnerable adult may be someone entirely different from the person the CV describes.
The absence of a Sex Offenders Register in Ghana is not a reason to lower the safeguarding standard. It is a reason to raise the rigour of the due diligence that employers in care settings apply — because the national safety net most countries rely on simply is not there to catch the person who slips through. The burden of protection falls on the employer, the school, the home, the hospital, the household — and on the professional firms they engage to do what the state is not yet equipped to do.
How Other Countries
Have Built This.
Ghana is not the first country to recognise that a fragmented approach to safeguarding puts children and vulnerable adults at risk. The countries below have each, over decades and in response to specific national incidents, built structured systems that either register sex offenders or actively bar unsuitable persons from working with vulnerable people. Each model has strengths and weaknesses. Together, they provide a clear picture of what the state-level infrastructure can look like — and what, in the interim, Ghanaian organisations can adapt into their own private-sector safeguarding practice.
South Africa's NRSO was established by an Act of Parliament in 2007 and expanded in 2021 to cover offences against all vulnerable persons, not only children and persons with mental disabilities. The register is a record of names of those found guilty of sexual offences against vulnerable persons — whether the offence was committed inside or outside South Africa. It creates a legal obligation on employers in both the public and private sector to check whether a person being hired is fit to work with vulnerable people.
As of early 2025, the register held 32,501 active offenders, with a further 10,325 under consideration for inclusion. Individuals listed on the NRSO are barred from employment giving access to vulnerable persons, and are prohibited from fostering or adopting children. The register is not currently open to the general public — a matter of active legislative debate in South Africa — but is accessible to employers under a controlled procedure. A parallel National Child Protection Register operates under the Children's Act of 2005 and maintains Part B: persons found by a court to be unsuitable to work with children.
The UK's Disclosure and Barring Service is arguably the most developed safeguarding vetting system in operation. It was formed in 2012 by merging the Criminal Records Bureau and the Independent Safeguarding Authority. The DBS does two things: it provides four tiers of criminal record disclosure, and it maintains two Barred Lists — the Children's Barred List and the Adults' Barred List. A person on either Barred List is legally prohibited from working in "regulated activity" with that group, and it is a criminal offence for an employer to knowingly employ a barred person in regulated activity.
The Enhanced DBS Check — required for teachers, healthcare staff, childcare workers, and anyone working with vulnerable groups — includes criminal conviction history, cautions, and non-conviction information held by relevant police forces that the Chief Police Officer considers should be disclosed. Employers, regulatory bodies, and volunteer managers have a legal duty to refer to DBS any safeguarding concern that meets the threshold, meaning the system captures concerns that never reach the criminal justice system.
Australia operates a state-based system of Working with Children Checks — a mandatory, portable, employee-held clearance that allows the holder to engage in child-related work. Each state maintains its own check (WWCC in New South Wales and Victoria, Blue Card in Queensland, Working with Vulnerable People Check in ACT) but the underlying principle is consistent: the individual, not the employer, holds the check; the check is rigorous and periodic; and the check is a legal precondition to child-related work.
A Working with Children Check assesses national criminal history, findings of professional misconduct, reportable conduct — including misconduct that did not result in a criminal conviction — and any disciplinary information held by professional regulators. The system includes continuous monitoring: if relevant new information emerges during the validity period of a check, the check can be revoked. Crucially, the individual carries their clearance across employers — reducing the friction of recruitment while maintaining the protective standard. This is a model particularly well-suited to jurisdictions with large informal or self-employed caregiving sectors.
Nigeria's Sex Offenders Database is operated by the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP) and was established to document reported, arraigned, and convicted sex offences as defined under the Violence Against Persons (Prohibition) Act 2015. The register is notable in the African context for being partially publicly accessible: data on those convicted is available directly on the NSOD website, while data on reported or arraigned but not yet convicted cases is available on a controlled-access basis.
The Nigerian model is particularly useful as a reference for Ghana because of the shared regional context, comparable legal tradition, and the practical design choice to make conviction data public while protecting non-conviction data through controlled access. The register also operates a parallel registry of service providers and NGOs that offer safeguarding services — a feature relevant to Ghana as the domestic safeguarding ecosystem develops. The Nigerian experience demonstrates that West African jurisdictions can operate functional sex offender registers; the absence of one in Ghana is not a regional inevitability.
Across every working model — South Africa, the UK, Australia, Nigeria, and numerous others — three features recur. First, the system captures non-conviction information: safeguarding concerns, disciplinary findings, and protective barrings that never reached the criminal courts. Second, there is a legal obligation on employers in regulated activity to check against the register or barred list before appointment. Third, there are periodic updates — the system does not treat a single clean check as a permanent clearance. Every feature addresses a specific failure mode that a simple criminal record check cannot address. And every feature is implementable, in some form, inside a private-sector safeguarding framework even before national legislation catches up.
The Sectors Where Ghana's
Safeguarding Silence Matters Most
In each of the following sectors, children or vulnerable adults are placed daily in the care of adults whose full safeguarding history cannot currently be verified in Ghana. Each of these sectors is a place where the responsible employer should be applying a standard of pre-appointment and periodic screening that compensates for the absence of national infrastructure.
Basic schools, junior and senior high schools, boarding houses, private international schools, tuition and extra-curricular providers, sports coaches, music and arts instructors, boarding-house masters and mistresses. Every adult with sustained access to children in an educational capacity. Ghana's Plan Ghana research identifies teachers as among the top-reported perpetrators of sexual abuse in school settings.
Residential care providers, orphanages, group homes, rehabilitation facilities for children, transitional homes. Children in residential care are among the most vulnerable in any society — separated from family networks, often traumatised before arrival, and dependent on institutional staff for basic protection. The screening standard for residential childcare personnel must be uncompromising.
Paediatric and maternity wards, mental health facilities, special-needs care providers, facilities serving elderly or cognitively impaired patients. Healthcare staff routinely have intimate access to vulnerable patients with limited capacity to report harm. The combination of physical access, psychological authority, and diminished capacity to report makes this a category requiring enhanced safeguarding rigour.
Churches, mosques, Sunday schools, youth fellowships, religious camps, choirs, religious boarding programmes. Institutional religious settings have historically been among the environments where safeguarding failures have produced some of the most serious documented cases of institutional abuse worldwide. Ghana's religious institutions are no exception to the pattern, and the safeguarding standard applied should not be either.
House-helps, nannies, drivers, security personnel, gardeners, tutors, and private caregivers working inside the homes of high-net-worth families in Accra, Kumasi, Takoradi, and the diaspora's Ghanaian bases. The private household is the least-regulated safeguarding environment of all — and often the one with the longest, most intimate, and most unsupervised access to children and vulnerable elders.
Football academies, martial arts instructors, dance teachers, music tutors, drama coaches, scouts and youth movement leaders, summer camp operators. Adult-child relationships built on mentorship, physical contact, and out-of-school authority. Globally, extracurricular settings have produced a disproportionate share of documented abuse cases — because the adult enjoys authority without the institutional scrutiny of a school.
Whose Protection This Brief
Is Actually About
The analytical case for comprehensive safeguarding screening is made throughout this brief in institutional and operational terms. But the institutions and operations exist for one purpose only: to protect specific categories of human beings whose vulnerability the rest of us are collectively responsible for addressing.
Every child in a Ghanaian classroom, hostel, boarding house, or after-school programme — who has no means of independently verifying that the adult in front of them is fit to be there.
Every child in an orphanage, a children's home, a rehabilitation centre, a foster arrangement — children already made vulnerable by circumstance, for whom institutional protection is the primary safety net.
Adults with intellectual or cognitive disabilities, elderly patients with dementia, psychiatric inpatients, and individuals under sedation or post-operative care — whose capacity to report harm is itself compromised.
The child in a household where domestic staff have sustained, unsupervised, intimate access — where the employer's due diligence is often the only line of protection, and where the consequence of its absence is measured in a child's life.
"Vulnerable children and adults in Ghana are protected today by the goodwill of responsible employers, the diligence of individual caregivers, and the presence of family members watching. They are not protected by a system. Until they are, the responsible employer must become the system."— OSG Intelligence Brief 12
What OSG Offers in the Absence
of a National Register
OSG has designed a comprehensive safeguarding assessment framework specifically calibrated for the Ghanaian context — for employers in education, care, healthcare, religious institutions, domestic households, and youth programmes who cannot wait for national infrastructure to close the gap. The framework incorporates the operational lessons of the South African NRSO, the UK DBS, the Australian WWCC, and the Nigerian NSOD, adapted for the specific instruments and records available in Ghana today.
Beyond the standard Ghana Police clearance, OSG conducts enhanced inquiry with the Domestic Violence and Victims Support Unit (where legal consent permits), with the Ghana Education Service for teacher disciplinary records, with the Nurses and Midwifery Council of Ghana and the Medical and Dental Council for health professional conduct records, and with the Department of Social Welfare where foster or childcare licensing exists. Where the candidate has lived or worked abroad, OSG conducts parallel inquiry with equivalent bodies in those jurisdictions.
OSG contacts each previous employer directly, with specific focus on the safeguarding-relevant questions that reference letters rarely address: was the candidate ever the subject of a safeguarding concern or complaint? was the candidate ever asked to leave a post on conduct grounds, even if the departure was framed as voluntary? was the candidate ever moved away from direct access to children or vulnerable adults while employed? The answers surface patterns that a conventional reference check will not detect.
Teaching qualifications verified with the Ghana Education Service and the relevant colleges of education at source, not against copies supplied by the candidate. Nursing and allied health qualifications verified directly with the Nurses and Midwifery Council. Social work qualifications verified with the relevant regulatory body. Foreign qualifications verified at source with the originating institution — not merely authenticated by a stamp on a photocopy.
For roles with sustained direct access to children or vulnerable adults, OSG's psychological fitness assessment applies internationally validated instruments — including integrity psychometrics and clinical suitability assessment — to identify personality configurations and risk indicators associated with safeguarding failure. This is the same category of assessment that leading international safeguarding systems apply to the most sensitive care-giving roles.
Comprehensive adverse media review across Ghanaian, regional, and international sources — picking up press reports of disciplinary actions, investigations, or concerns that may never have resulted in formal conviction. Digital footprint analysis. And — within the bounds of legal consent and Ghana's Data Protection Act — discreet community-level enquiry in the candidate's home and professional community to surface the concerns that paper records often do not capture.
A single pre-appointment screen is not sufficient. OSG offers an annual re-screening programme for safeguarding-critical roles — matching the international standard, in which the adult who was cleared last year is re-verified this year, because circumstances change and new information emerges. Client employers receive a confidential safeguarding status report that allows them to meet their own governance and reputational obligations.
When assembled into an integrated safeguarding screening package, the OSG framework produces — in the Ghanaian context — an approximation of what a DBS Enhanced Check with Barred List verification delivers in the United Kingdom, or what a working WWCC clearance delivers in Australia. It is not a substitute for national infrastructure, and OSG publicly supports the establishment of a Ghana Sex Offenders Register as a matter of national priority. But in the meantime, it is the closest equivalent available to employers who are not willing to wait, and whose duty to the children and vulnerable adults in their care does not permit them to wait.
The Standard Ghana's Schools,
Care Facilities and Households Can Adopt Now
This brief is addressed to decision-makers: heads of schools, directors of children's homes, managing directors of hospitals, chairpersons of religious organisations, heads of household, and the boards that oversee them. The actions below are within the reach of any responsible employer, and do not require a change in national legislation to implement.
For Schools & Educational Institutions
Adopt a written safeguarding policy that applies to every appointment with access to students — teachers, boarders' masters, drivers, cleaners, security, external coaches. Require enhanced screening beyond police clearance for all appointments, calibrated to the specific safeguarding risk of the role. Implement annual re-screening for permanent staff. Maintain an internal safeguarding log. Train all staff on recognising and reporting safeguarding concerns. Require the same standard from external contractors.
For Children's Homes & Residential Care
Apply the highest level of safeguarding screening to every member of staff, resident volunteer, trustee, and regular visitor. Implement psychological fitness assessment for all care-giving roles. Maintain an independent safeguarding officer with direct reporting to the Board. Conduct quarterly reviews of the safeguarding log. Treat a single substantiated concern as a mandatory cause for dismissal, not a reputational problem to be contained.
For Hospitals & Healthcare Facilities
Require credential verification at source with the Nurses and Midwifery Council, the Medical and Dental Council, and equivalent foreign bodies for every clinical appointment. Apply enhanced safeguarding screening to staff working in paediatrics, maternity, mental health, geriatric care, and disability services. Maintain a named safeguarding lead within the facility. Implement mandatory safeguarding training for all staff — clinical and non-clinical alike.
For High-Net-Worth Households
Apply professional safeguarding screening to every member of domestic staff who will have direct or unsupervised access to children, elderly, or cognitively impaired family members. This is the single most important due diligence step a family can take, and the one most often skipped. OSG's Domestic Staff Screening package is designed precisely for this purpose and operates under strict confidentiality and Ghana Data Protection Act compliance.
Comprehensive safeguarding screening in Ghana — including enhanced regulatory inquiry, safeguarding-specific reference checks, credential source verification, psychological assessment, and adverse media review — costs between GHS 1,800 and GHS 4,500 per candidate depending on role and risk profile. This is not a trivial sum. It is, however, materially less than the cost of a single safeguarding incident — measured in harm to the child or vulnerable adult, in legal exposure to the institution, and in the reputational destruction that follows even one substantiated case. The cost of not screening is not a saving.
The Responsibility Is
Not Optional.
A national Sex Offenders Register for Ghana is a worthy goal, and OSG supports every serious effort to establish one. But that advocacy cannot become an excuse for inaction at the institutional level. Every day that responsible employers continue to hire for safeguarding-critical roles using only a police clearance certificate is a day on which Ghana's children and vulnerable adults are less protected than they would be under almost any comparable national framework.
The gap cannot be closed tomorrow by the state. It can be closed today, one employer at a time, by the institutions and households that understand what is at stake — and that refuse to outsource a duty they cannot delegate.
"The absence of a national register is not the end of the safeguarding argument. It is the beginning of the responsible employer's duty to build the protection that the state has not yet built."— OSG Intelligence Brief 12
Build Your Safeguarding Standard
Before You Need It.
Commission OSG's Safeguarding Screening for your school, care facility, hospital, or household. Or request a confidential Safeguarding Audit of your current hiring and monitoring practice — identifying where your specific organisation sits against international best practice and what needs to change.
Commission Safeguarding Screening Request a Safeguarding AuditGhana does not have a Sex Offenders Register. Schools, children's homes, hospitals and care facilities across the country hire staff every day without the single database that almost every comparable country considers fundamental to protecting children and vulnerable adults from harm.
The Register Ghana Does Not Have.
This is a brief about the silence in Ghana's child and vulnerable-adult protection architecture — and about what organisations can do, today, to close that gap while the national infrastructure is still being built. It draws on the working models of South Africa, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Nigeria. And it proposes a private-sector safeguarding standard that Ghana's responsible employers can implement now, without waiting for the law to catch up.
A Protection Register That Does Not Exist
In August 2020, the Domestic Violence and Victims Support Unit (DOVVSU) of the Ghana Police Service publicly announced that the country would establish a Sex Offenders Register — to serve as a national reference point for the protection of children and vulnerable adults. The announcement was welcomed. Years on, the register remains on the drawing board. No public database exists. No employer of teachers, caregivers, or domestic staff in Ghana can check a candidate's name against a national list of persons convicted of sexual offences against children or vulnerable adults, because that list does not exist in an accessible form.
This is not a technical detail. It is a structural gap in Ghana's safeguarding architecture that has consequences every day — in schools, children's homes, hospitals, places of worship, and private households where vulnerable people are cared for by adults whose history cannot be independently verified against the single record that matters most.
"We don't have one specifically for rape convicts, but we intend to do that going forward. It is on the drawing board, to establish a register for people who have been convicted of rape which among other things is to serve as a reference point."— Chief Superintendent Owusua Kyeremeh, National Coordinator, DOVVSU, August 2020
Average annual incidence rate of recorded child rape per 100,000 girls up to age 19 in Ghana, 2010–2014, according to the Domestic Violence and Victims Support Unit. Reported cases only. The actual rate is widely believed to be many times higher.
A Plan Ghana study conducted in Awutu Senya, Effutu and Upper Manya Krobo Districts found that approximately 14% of female students and 10% of male students reported having been sexually abused — by classmates, teachers, and relatives.
Among survivors in the Plan Ghana study who identified their abusers, 21% named teachers as among the perpetrators. Teachers sit alongside classmates, neighbours, and relatives as the adults children most commonly report having been abused by.
Statistics on sexual offences are notoriously under-reported everywhere in the world. In Ghana — where stigma, family pressure to withdraw complaints, long-delayed justice and limited institutional response frequently discourage reporting — the true scale is almost certainly a significant multiple of what is recorded. OSG cites only figures that have been independently documented by Ghana Police, DOVVSU, or peer-reviewed academic research. Where numbers are uncertain, we say so. The underlying reality is not uncertain: the gap between recorded cases and actual incidence is wide, and the recorded cases alone are more than sufficient to justify comprehensive safeguarding screening.
A Police Clearance Certificate Is
Not a Safeguarding Check.
Every school, children's home, hospital, rehabilitation centre, boarding house, Sunday school, and high-net-worth household in Ghana relies — at the point of hiring — on a Ghana Police Criminal Records Bureau clearance, a reference letter, and a CV. This is the safeguarding infrastructure. None of these instruments is designed to do what a Sex Offenders Register or a Barred List does. The gap between what these instruments provide and what safeguarding actually requires is the gap in which harm to vulnerable people is enabled.
Not Concerns, Referrals, or Barring.
A Ghana Police clearance certificate confirms whether the individual has a recorded criminal conviction. It does not capture: allegations that were investigated but not prosecuted; safeguarding referrals made by previous employers; disciplinary findings by professional bodies; dismissals for conduct concerns; or concerns raised by children, parents, or other staff that never reached the criminal justice system. In the UK system, most people barred from working with children were barred on the basis of non-conviction information — safeguarding referrals and disciplinary findings. That entire category of risk is invisible to a Ghana police clearance.
The pattern is documented across every jurisdiction that has studied institutional abuse. An individual dismissed from one school for conduct concerns — without a criminal conviction — simply applies for a post at the next school, where the concerns are invisible. Without a national register or barred list, nothing in the hiring process is designed to detect this pattern. In the United States, the Government Accountability Office documented 15 cases of individuals with histories of sexual misconduct who were hired or retained by public and private schools as teachers, administrators, and volunteers — specifically because the safeguarding information was not systematically captured and made accessible to employers.
Ghana hosts significant numbers of foreign nationals working in education, healthcare, religious institutions, development agencies, and private care. A Ghana police clearance captures convictions within Ghana. It does not capture convictions in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa, or any other jurisdiction. An individual barred from working with children in their country of origin can — unless specifically asked and their answer independently verified — secure a position in Ghana working with children, without the red flag ever surfacing.
Teaching qualifications, nursing licences, social work certifications, and childcare credentials are frequently fabricated or fraudulently obtained in Ghana — a pattern OSG has covered in prior briefs. The individual presenting themselves as a qualified teacher or caregiver may not only lack legitimate credentials but may have been struck off or disciplined under a different name or a prior credential. Without source verification and — where professional regulation exists — a direct check against the regulatory body, the person standing in front of a child or a vulnerable adult may be someone entirely different from the person the CV describes.
The absence of a Sex Offenders Register in Ghana is not a reason to lower the safeguarding standard. It is a reason to raise the rigour of the due diligence that employers in care settings apply — because the national safety net most countries rely on simply is not there to catch the person who slips through. The burden of protection falls on the employer, the school, the home, the hospital, the household — and on the professional firms they engage to do what the state is not yet equipped to do.
How Other Countries
Have Built This.
Ghana is not the first country to recognise that a fragmented approach to safeguarding puts children and vulnerable adults at risk. The countries below have each, over decades and in response to specific national incidents, built structured systems that either register sex offenders or actively bar unsuitable persons from working with vulnerable people. Each model has strengths and weaknesses. Together, they provide a clear picture of what the state-level infrastructure can look like — and what, in the interim, Ghanaian organisations can adapt into their own private-sector safeguarding practice.
South Africa's NRSO was established by an Act of Parliament in 2007 and expanded in 2021 to cover offences against all vulnerable persons, not only children and persons with mental disabilities. The register is a record of names of those found guilty of sexual offences against vulnerable persons — whether the offence was committed inside or outside South Africa. It creates a legal obligation on employers in both the public and private sector to check whether a person being hired is fit to work with vulnerable people.
As of early 2025, the register held 32,501 active offenders, with a further 10,325 under consideration for inclusion. Individuals listed on the NRSO are barred from employment giving access to vulnerable persons, and are prohibited from fostering or adopting children. The register is not currently open to the general public — a matter of active legislative debate in South Africa — but is accessible to employers under a controlled procedure. A parallel National Child Protection Register operates under the Children's Act of 2005 and maintains Part B: persons found by a court to be unsuitable to work with children.
The UK's Disclosure and Barring Service is arguably the most developed safeguarding vetting system in operation. It was formed in 2012 by merging the Criminal Records Bureau and the Independent Safeguarding Authority. The DBS does two things: it provides four tiers of criminal record disclosure, and it maintains two Barred Lists — the Children's Barred List and the Adults' Barred List. A person on either Barred List is legally prohibited from working in "regulated activity" with that group, and it is a criminal offence for an employer to knowingly employ a barred person in regulated activity.
The Enhanced DBS Check — required for teachers, healthcare staff, childcare workers, and anyone working with vulnerable groups — includes criminal conviction history, cautions, and non-conviction information held by relevant police forces that the Chief Police Officer considers should be disclosed. Employers, regulatory bodies, and volunteer managers have a legal duty to refer to DBS any safeguarding concern that meets the threshold, meaning the system captures concerns that never reach the criminal justice system.
Australia operates a state-based system of Working with Children Checks — a mandatory, portable, employee-held clearance that allows the holder to engage in child-related work. Each state maintains its own check (WWCC in New South Wales and Victoria, Blue Card in Queensland, Working with Vulnerable People Check in ACT) but the underlying principle is consistent: the individual, not the employer, holds the check; the check is rigorous and periodic; and the check is a legal precondition to child-related work.
A Working with Children Check assesses national criminal history, findings of professional misconduct, reportable conduct — including misconduct that did not result in a criminal conviction — and any disciplinary information held by professional regulators. The system includes continuous monitoring: if relevant new information emerges during the validity period of a check, the check can be revoked. Crucially, the individual carries their clearance across employers — reducing the friction of recruitment while maintaining the protective standard. This is a model particularly well-suited to jurisdictions with large informal or self-employed caregiving sectors.
Nigeria's Sex Offenders Database is operated by the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP) and was established to document reported, arraigned, and convicted sex offences as defined under the Violence Against Persons (Prohibition) Act 2015. The register is notable in the African context for being partially publicly accessible: data on those convicted is available directly on the NSOD website, while data on reported or arraigned but not yet convicted cases is available on a controlled-access basis.
The Nigerian model is particularly useful as a reference for Ghana because of the shared regional context, comparable legal tradition, and the practical design choice to make conviction data public while protecting non-conviction data through controlled access. The register also operates a parallel registry of service providers and NGOs that offer safeguarding services — a feature relevant to Ghana as the domestic safeguarding ecosystem develops. The Nigerian experience demonstrates that West African jurisdictions can operate functional sex offender registers; the absence of one in Ghana is not a regional inevitability.
Across every working model — South Africa, the UK, Australia, Nigeria, and numerous others — three features recur. First, the system captures non-conviction information: safeguarding concerns, disciplinary findings, and protective barrings that never reached the criminal courts. Second, there is a legal obligation on employers in regulated activity to check against the register or barred list before appointment. Third, there are periodic updates — the system does not treat a single clean check as a permanent clearance. Every feature addresses a specific failure mode that a simple criminal record check cannot address. And every feature is implementable, in some form, inside a private-sector safeguarding framework even before national legislation catches up.
The Sectors Where Ghana's
Safeguarding Silence Matters Most
In each of the following sectors, children or vulnerable adults are placed daily in the care of adults whose full safeguarding history cannot currently be verified in Ghana. Each of these sectors is a place where the responsible employer should be applying a standard of pre-appointment and periodic screening that compensates for the absence of national infrastructure.
Basic schools, junior and senior high schools, boarding houses, private international schools, tuition and extra-curricular providers, sports coaches, music and arts instructors, boarding-house masters and mistresses. Every adult with sustained access to children in an educational capacity. Ghana's Plan Ghana research identifies teachers as among the top-reported perpetrators of sexual abuse in school settings.
Residential care providers, orphanages, group homes, rehabilitation facilities for children, transitional homes. Children in residential care are among the most vulnerable in any society — separated from family networks, often traumatised before arrival, and dependent on institutional staff for basic protection. The screening standard for residential childcare personnel must be uncompromising.
Paediatric and maternity wards, mental health facilities, special-needs care providers, facilities serving elderly or cognitively impaired patients. Healthcare staff routinely have intimate access to vulnerable patients with limited capacity to report harm. The combination of physical access, psychological authority, and diminished capacity to report makes this a category requiring enhanced safeguarding rigour.
Churches, mosques, Sunday schools, youth fellowships, religious camps, choirs, religious boarding programmes. Institutional religious settings have historically been among the environments where safeguarding failures have produced some of the most serious documented cases of institutional abuse worldwide. Ghana's religious institutions are no exception to the pattern, and the safeguarding standard applied should not be either.
House-helps, nannies, drivers, security personnel, gardeners, tutors, and private caregivers working inside the homes of high-net-worth families in Accra, Kumasi, Takoradi, and the diaspora's Ghanaian bases. The private household is the least-regulated safeguarding environment of all — and often the one with the longest, most intimate, and most unsupervised access to children and vulnerable elders.
Football academies, martial arts instructors, dance teachers, music tutors, drama coaches, scouts and youth movement leaders, summer camp operators. Adult-child relationships built on mentorship, physical contact, and out-of-school authority. Globally, extracurricular settings have produced a disproportionate share of documented abuse cases — because the adult enjoys authority without the institutional scrutiny of a school.
Whose Protection This Brief
Is Actually About
The analytical case for comprehensive safeguarding screening is made throughout this brief in institutional and operational terms. But the institutions and operations exist for one purpose only: to protect specific categories of human beings whose vulnerability the rest of us are collectively responsible for addressing.
Every child in a Ghanaian classroom, hostel, boarding house, or after-school programme — who has no means of independently verifying that the adult in front of them is fit to be there.
Every child in an orphanage, a children's home, a rehabilitation centre, a foster arrangement — children already made vulnerable by circumstance, for whom institutional protection is the primary safety net.
Adults with intellectual or cognitive disabilities, elderly patients with dementia, psychiatric inpatients, and individuals under sedation or post-operative care — whose capacity to report harm is itself compromised.
The child in a household where domestic staff have sustained, unsupervised, intimate access — where the employer's due diligence is often the only line of protection, and where the consequence of its absence is measured in a child's life.
"Vulnerable children and adults in Ghana are protected today by the goodwill of responsible employers, the diligence of individual caregivers, and the presence of family members watching. They are not protected by a system. Until they are, the responsible employer must become the system."— OSG Intelligence Brief 12
What OSG Offers in the Absence
of a National Register
OSG has designed a comprehensive safeguarding assessment framework specifically calibrated for the Ghanaian context — for employers in education, care, healthcare, religious institutions, domestic households, and youth programmes who cannot wait for national infrastructure to close the gap. The framework incorporates the operational lessons of the South African NRSO, the UK DBS, the Australian WWCC, and the Nigerian NSOD, adapted for the specific instruments and records available in Ghana today.
Beyond the standard Ghana Police clearance, OSG conducts enhanced inquiry with the Domestic Violence and Victims Support Unit (where legal consent permits), with the Ghana Education Service for teacher disciplinary records, with the Nurses and Midwifery Council of Ghana and the Medical and Dental Council for health professional conduct records, and with the Department of Social Welfare where foster or childcare licensing exists. Where the candidate has lived or worked abroad, OSG conducts parallel inquiry with equivalent bodies in those jurisdictions.
OSG contacts each previous employer directly, with specific focus on the safeguarding-relevant questions that reference letters rarely address: was the candidate ever the subject of a safeguarding concern or complaint? was the candidate ever asked to leave a post on conduct grounds, even if the departure was framed as voluntary? was the candidate ever moved away from direct access to children or vulnerable adults while employed? The answers surface patterns that a conventional reference check will not detect.
Teaching qualifications verified with the Ghana Education Service and the relevant colleges of education at source, not against copies supplied by the candidate. Nursing and allied health qualifications verified directly with the Nurses and Midwifery Council. Social work qualifications verified with the relevant regulatory body. Foreign qualifications verified at source with the originating institution — not merely authenticated by a stamp on a photocopy.
For roles with sustained direct access to children or vulnerable adults, OSG's psychological fitness assessment applies internationally validated instruments — including integrity psychometrics and clinical suitability assessment — to identify personality configurations and risk indicators associated with safeguarding failure. This is the same category of assessment that leading international safeguarding systems apply to the most sensitive care-giving roles.
Comprehensive adverse media review across Ghanaian, regional, and international sources — picking up press reports of disciplinary actions, investigations, or concerns that may never have resulted in formal conviction. Digital footprint analysis. And — within the bounds of legal consent and Ghana's Data Protection Act — discreet community-level enquiry in the candidate's home and professional community to surface the concerns that paper records often do not capture.
A single pre-appointment screen is not sufficient. OSG offers an annual re-screening programme for safeguarding-critical roles — matching the international standard, in which the adult who was cleared last year is re-verified this year, because circumstances change and new information emerges. Client employers receive a confidential safeguarding status report that allows them to meet their own governance and reputational obligations.
When assembled into an integrated safeguarding screening package, the OSG framework produces — in the Ghanaian context — an approximation of what a DBS Enhanced Check with Barred List verification delivers in the United Kingdom, or what a working WWCC clearance delivers in Australia. It is not a substitute for national infrastructure, and OSG publicly supports the establishment of a Ghana Sex Offenders Register as a matter of national priority. But in the meantime, it is the closest equivalent available to employers who are not willing to wait, and whose duty to the children and vulnerable adults in their care does not permit them to wait.
The Standard Ghana's Schools,
Care Facilities and Households Can Adopt Now
This brief is addressed to decision-makers: heads of schools, directors of children's homes, managing directors of hospitals, chairpersons of religious organisations, heads of household, and the boards that oversee them. The actions below are within the reach of any responsible employer, and do not require a change in national legislation to implement.
For Schools & Educational Institutions
Adopt a written safeguarding policy that applies to every appointment with access to students — teachers, boarders' masters, drivers, cleaners, security, external coaches. Require enhanced screening beyond police clearance for all appointments, calibrated to the specific safeguarding risk of the role. Implement annual re-screening for permanent staff. Maintain an internal safeguarding log. Train all staff on recognising and reporting safeguarding concerns. Require the same standard from external contractors.
For Children's Homes & Residential Care
Apply the highest level of safeguarding screening to every member of staff, resident volunteer, trustee, and regular visitor. Implement psychological fitness assessment for all care-giving roles. Maintain an independent safeguarding officer with direct reporting to the Board. Conduct quarterly reviews of the safeguarding log. Treat a single substantiated concern as a mandatory cause for dismissal, not a reputational problem to be contained.
For Hospitals & Healthcare Facilities
Require credential verification at source with the Nurses and Midwifery Council, the Medical and Dental Council, and equivalent foreign bodies for every clinical appointment. Apply enhanced safeguarding screening to staff working in paediatrics, maternity, mental health, geriatric care, and disability services. Maintain a named safeguarding lead within the facility. Implement mandatory safeguarding training for all staff — clinical and non-clinical alike.
For High-Net-Worth Households
Apply professional safeguarding screening to every member of domestic staff who will have direct or unsupervised access to children, elderly, or cognitively impaired family members. This is the single most important due diligence step a family can take, and the one most often skipped. OSG's Domestic Staff Screening package is designed precisely for this purpose and operates under strict confidentiality and Ghana Data Protection Act compliance.
Comprehensive safeguarding screening in Ghana — including enhanced regulatory inquiry, safeguarding-specific reference checks, credential source verification, psychological assessment, and adverse media review — costs between GHS 1,800 and GHS 4,500 per candidate depending on role and risk profile. This is not a trivial sum. It is, however, materially less than the cost of a single safeguarding incident — measured in harm to the child or vulnerable adult, in legal exposure to the institution, and in the reputational destruction that follows even one substantiated case. The cost of not screening is not a saving.
The Responsibility Is
Not Optional.
A national Sex Offenders Register for Ghana is a worthy goal, and OSG supports every serious effort to establish one. But that advocacy cannot become an excuse for inaction at the institutional level. Every day that responsible employers continue to hire for safeguarding-critical roles using only a police clearance certificate is a day on which Ghana's children and vulnerable adults are less protected than they would be under almost any comparable national framework.
The gap cannot be closed tomorrow by the state. It can be closed today, one employer at a time, by the institutions and households that understand what is at stake — and that refuse to outsource a duty they cannot delegate.
"The absence of a national register is not the end of the safeguarding argument. It is the beginning of the responsible employer's duty to build the protection that the state has not yet built."— OSG Intelligence Brief 12
Build Your Safeguarding Standard
Before You Need It.
Commission OSG's Safeguarding Screening for your school, care facility, hospital, or household. Or request a confidential Safeguarding Audit of your current hiring and monitoring practice — identifying where your specific organisation sits against international best practice and what needs to change.
Commission Safeguarding Screening Request a Safeguarding AuditGhana does not have a Sex Offenders Register. Schools, children's homes, hospitals and care facilities across the country hire staff every day without the single database that almost every comparable country considers fundamental to protecting children and vulnerable adults from harm.
The RegisterGhana DoesNot Have.
This is a brief about the silence in Ghana's child and vulnerable-adult protection architecture — and about what organisations can do, today, to close that gap while the national infrastructure is still being built. It draws on the working models of South Africa, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Nigeria. And it proposes a private-sector safeguarding standard that Ghana's responsible employers can implement now, without waiting for the law to catch up.
A Protection Register That Does Not Exist
In August 2020, the Domestic Violence and Victims Support Unit (DOVVSU) of the Ghana Police Service publicly announced that the country would establish a Sex Offenders Register — to serve as a national reference point for the protection of children and vulnerable adults. The announcement was welcomed. Years on, the register remains on the drawing board. No public database exists. No employer of teachers, caregivers, or domestic staff in Ghana can check a candidate's name against a national list of persons convicted of sexual offences against children or vulnerable adults, because that list does not exist in an accessible form.
This is not a technical detail. It is a structural gap in Ghana's safeguarding architecture that has consequences every day — in schools, children's homes, hospitals, places of worship, and private households where vulnerable people are cared for by adults whose history cannot be independently verified against the single record that matters most.
"We don't have one specifically for rape convicts, but we intend to do that going forward. It is on the drawing board, to establish a register for people who have been convicted of rape which among other things is to serve as a reference point."— Chief Superintendent Owusua Kyeremeh, National Coordinator, DOVVSU, August 2020
Average annual incidence rate of recorded child rape per 100,000 girls up to age 19 in Ghana, 2010–2014, according to the Domestic Violence and Victims Support Unit. Reported cases only. The actual rate is widely believed to be many times higher.
A Plan Ghana study conducted in Awutu Senya, Effutu and Upper Manya Krobo Districts found that approximately 14% of female students and 10% of male students reported having been sexually abused — by classmates, teachers, and relatives.
Among survivors in the Plan Ghana study who identified their abusers, 21% named teachers as among the perpetrators. Teachers sit alongside classmates, neighbours, and relatives as the adults children most commonly report having been abused by.
Statistics on sexual offences are notoriously under-reported everywhere in the world. In Ghana — where stigma, family pressure to withdraw complaints, long-delayed justice and limited institutional response frequently discourage reporting — the true scale is almost certainly a significant multiple of what is recorded. OSG cites only figures that have been independently documented by Ghana Police, DOVVSU, or peer-reviewed academic research. Where numbers are uncertain, we say so. The underlying reality is not uncertain: the gap between recorded cases and actual incidence is wide, and the recorded cases alone are more than sufficient to justify comprehensive safeguarding screening.
A Police Clearance Certificate Is
Not a Safeguarding Check.
Every school, children's home, hospital, rehabilitation centre, boarding house, Sunday school, and high-net-worth household in Ghana relies — at the point of hiring — on a Ghana Police Criminal Records Bureau clearance, a reference letter, and a CV. This is the safeguarding infrastructure. None of these instruments is designed to do what a Sex Offenders Register or a Barred List does. The gap between what these instruments provide and what safeguarding actually requires is the gap in which harm to vulnerable people is enabled.
Not Concerns, Referrals, or Barring.
A Ghana Police clearance certificate confirms whether the individual has a recorded criminal conviction. It does not capture: allegations that were investigated but not prosecuted; safeguarding referrals made by previous employers; disciplinary findings by professional bodies; dismissals for conduct concerns; or concerns raised by children, parents, or other staff that never reached the criminal justice system. In the UK system, most people barred from working with children were barred on the basis of non-conviction information — safeguarding referrals and disciplinary findings. That entire category of risk is invisible to a Ghana police clearance.
The pattern is documented across every jurisdiction that has studied institutional abuse. An individual dismissed from one school for conduct concerns — without a criminal conviction — simply applies for a post at the next school, where the concerns are invisible. Without a national register or barred list, nothing in the hiring process is designed to detect this pattern. In the United States, the Government Accountability Office documented 15 cases of individuals with histories of sexual misconduct who were hired or retained by public and private schools as teachers, administrators, and volunteers — specifically because the safeguarding information was not systematically captured and made accessible to employers.
Ghana hosts significant numbers of foreign nationals working in education, healthcare, religious institutions, development agencies, and private care. A Ghana police clearance captures convictions within Ghana. It does not capture convictions in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa, or any other jurisdiction. An individual barred from working with children in their country of origin can — unless specifically asked and their answer independently verified — secure a position in Ghana working with children, without the red flag ever surfacing.
Teaching qualifications, nursing licences, social work certifications, and childcare credentials are frequently fabricated or fraudulently obtained in Ghana — a pattern OSG has covered in prior briefs. The individual presenting themselves as a qualified teacher or caregiver may not only lack legitimate credentials but may have been struck off or disciplined under a different name or a prior credential. Without source verification and — where professional regulation exists — a direct check against the regulatory body, the person standing in front of a child or a vulnerable adult may be someone entirely different from the person the CV describes.
The absence of a Sex Offenders Register in Ghana is not a reason to lower the safeguarding standard. It is a reason to raise the rigour of the due diligence that employers in care settings apply — because the national safety net most countries rely on simply is not there to catch the person who slips through. The burden of protection falls on the employer, the school, the home, the hospital, the household — and on the professional firms they engage to do what the state is not yet equipped to do.
How Other Countries
Have Built This.
Ghana is not the first country to recognise that a fragmented approach to safeguarding puts children and vulnerable adults at risk. The countries below have each, over decades and in response to specific national incidents, built structured systems that either register sex offenders or actively bar unsuitable persons from working with vulnerable people. Each model has strengths and weaknesses. Together, they provide a clear picture of what the state-level infrastructure can look like — and what, in the interim, Ghanaian organisations can adapt into their own private-sector safeguarding practice.
South Africa's NRSO was established by an Act of Parliament in 2007 and expanded in 2021 to cover offences against all vulnerable persons, not only children and persons with mental disabilities. The register is a record of names of those found guilty of sexual offences against vulnerable persons — whether the offence was committed inside or outside South Africa. It creates a legal obligation on employers in both the public and private sector to check whether a person being hired is fit to work with vulnerable people.
As of early 2025, the register held 32,501 active offenders, with a further 10,325 under consideration for inclusion. Individuals listed on the NRSO are barred from employment giving access to vulnerable persons, and are prohibited from fostering or adopting children. The register is not currently open to the general public — a matter of active legislative debate in South Africa — but is accessible to employers under a controlled procedure. A parallel National Child Protection Register operates under the Children's Act of 2005 and maintains Part B: persons found by a court to be unsuitable to work with children.
The UK's Disclosure and Barring Service is arguably the most developed safeguarding vetting system in operation. It was formed in 2012 by merging the Criminal Records Bureau and the Independent Safeguarding Authority. The DBS does two things: it provides four tiers of criminal record disclosure, and it maintains two Barred Lists — the Children's Barred List and the Adults' Barred List. A person on either Barred List is legally prohibited from working in "regulated activity" with that group, and it is a criminal offence for an employer to knowingly employ a barred person in regulated activity.
The Enhanced DBS Check — required for teachers, healthcare staff, childcare workers, and anyone working with vulnerable groups — includes criminal conviction history, cautions, and non-conviction information held by relevant police forces that the Chief Police Officer considers should be disclosed. Employers, regulatory bodies, and volunteer managers have a legal duty to refer to DBS any safeguarding concern that meets the threshold, meaning the system captures concerns that never reach the criminal justice system.
Australia operates a state-based system of Working with Children Checks — a mandatory, portable, employee-held clearance that allows the holder to engage in child-related work. Each state maintains its own check (WWCC in New South Wales and Victoria, Blue Card in Queensland, Working with Vulnerable People Check in ACT) but the underlying principle is consistent: the individual, not the employer, holds the check; the check is rigorous and periodic; and the check is a legal precondition to child-related work.
A Working with Children Check assesses national criminal history, findings of professional misconduct, reportable conduct — including misconduct that did not result in a criminal conviction — and any disciplinary information held by professional regulators. The system includes continuous monitoring: if relevant new information emerges during the validity period of a check, the check can be revoked. Crucially, the individual carries their clearance across employers — reducing the friction of recruitment while maintaining the protective standard. This is a model particularly well-suited to jurisdictions with large informal or self-employed caregiving sectors.
Nigeria's Sex Offenders Database is operated by the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP) and was established to document reported, arraigned, and convicted sex offences as defined under the Violence Against Persons (Prohibition) Act 2015. The register is notable in the African context for being partially publicly accessible: data on those convicted is available directly on the NSOD website, while data on reported or arraigned but not yet convicted cases is available on a controlled-access basis.
The Nigerian model is particularly useful as a reference for Ghana because of the shared regional context, comparable legal tradition, and the practical design choice to make conviction data public while protecting non-conviction data through controlled access. The register also operates a parallel registry of service providers and NGOs that offer safeguarding services — a feature relevant to Ghana as the domestic safeguarding ecosystem develops. The Nigerian experience demonstrates that West African jurisdictions can operate functional sex offender registers; the absence of one in Ghana is not a regional inevitability.
Across every working model — South Africa, the UK, Australia, Nigeria, and numerous others — three features recur. First, the system captures non-conviction information: safeguarding concerns, disciplinary findings, and protective barrings that never reached the criminal courts. Second, there is a legal obligation on employers in regulated activity to check against the register or barred list before appointment. Third, there are periodic updates — the system does not treat a single clean check as a permanent clearance. Every feature addresses a specific failure mode that a simple criminal record check cannot address. And every feature is implementable, in some form, inside a private-sector safeguarding framework even before national legislation catches up.
The Sectors Where Ghana's
Safeguarding Silence Matters Most
In each of the following sectors, children or vulnerable adults are placed daily in the care of adults whose full safeguarding history cannot currently be verified in Ghana. Each of these sectors is a place where the responsible employer should be applying a standard of pre-appointment and periodic screening that compensates for the absence of national infrastructure.
Basic schools, junior and senior high schools, boarding houses, private international schools, tuition and extra-curricular providers, sports coaches, music and arts instructors, boarding-house masters and mistresses. Every adult with sustained access to children in an educational capacity. Ghana's Plan Ghana research identifies teachers as among the top-reported perpetrators of sexual abuse in school settings.
Residential care providers, orphanages, group homes, rehabilitation facilities for children, transitional homes. Children in residential care are among the most vulnerable in any society — separated from family networks, often traumatised before arrival, and dependent on institutional staff for basic protection. The screening standard for residential childcare personnel must be uncompromising.
Paediatric and maternity wards, mental health facilities, special-needs care providers, facilities serving elderly or cognitively impaired patients. Healthcare staff routinely have intimate access to vulnerable patients with limited capacity to report harm. The combination of physical access, psychological authority, and diminished capacity to report makes this a category requiring enhanced safeguarding rigour.
Churches, mosques, Sunday schools, youth fellowships, religious camps, choirs, religious boarding programmes. Institutional religious settings have historically been among the environments where safeguarding failures have produced some of the most serious documented cases of institutional abuse worldwide. Ghana's religious institutions are no exception to the pattern, and the safeguarding standard applied should not be either.
House-helps, nannies, drivers, security personnel, gardeners, tutors, and private caregivers working inside the homes of high-net-worth families in Accra, Kumasi, Takoradi, and the diaspora's Ghanaian bases. The private household is the least-regulated safeguarding environment of all — and often the one with the longest, most intimate, and most unsupervised access to children and vulnerable elders.
Football academies, martial arts instructors, dance teachers, music tutors, drama coaches, scouts and youth movement leaders, summer camp operators. Adult-child relationships built on mentorship, physical contact, and out-of-school authority. Globally, extracurricular settings have produced a disproportionate share of documented abuse cases — because the adult enjoys authority without the institutional scrutiny of a school.
Whose Protection This Brief
Is Actually About
The analytical case for comprehensive safeguarding screening is made throughout this brief in institutional and operational terms. But the institutions and operations exist for one purpose only: to protect specific categories of human beings whose vulnerability the rest of us are collectively responsible for addressing.
Every child in a Ghanaian classroom, hostel, boarding house, or after-school programme — who has no means of independently verifying that the adult in front of them is fit to be there.
Every child in an orphanage, a children's home, a rehabilitation centre, a foster arrangement — children already made vulnerable by circumstance, for whom institutional protection is the primary safety net.
Adults with intellectual or cognitive disabilities, elderly patients with dementia, psychiatric inpatients, and individuals under sedation or post-operative care — whose capacity to report harm is itself compromised.
The child in a household where domestic staff have sustained, unsupervised, intimate access — where the employer's due diligence is often the only line of protection, and where the consequence of its absence is measured in a child's life.
"Vulnerable children and adults in Ghana are protected today by the goodwill of responsible employers, the diligence of individual caregivers, and the presence of family members watching. They are not protected by a system. Until they are, the responsible employer must become the system."— OSG Intelligence Brief 12
What OSG Offers in the Absence
of a National Register
OSG has designed a comprehensive safeguarding assessment framework specifically calibrated for the Ghanaian context — for employers in education, care, healthcare, religious institutions, domestic households, and youth programmes who cannot wait for national infrastructure to close the gap. The framework incorporates the operational lessons of the South African NRSO, the UK DBS, the Australian WWCC, and the Nigerian NSOD, adapted for the specific instruments and records available in Ghana today.
Beyond the standard Ghana Police clearance, OSG conducts enhanced inquiry with the Domestic Violence and Victims Support Unit (where legal consent permits), with the Ghana Education Service for teacher disciplinary records, with the Nurses and Midwifery Council of Ghana and the Medical and Dental Council for health professional conduct records, and with the Department of Social Welfare where foster or childcare licensing exists. Where the candidate has lived or worked abroad, OSG conducts parallel inquiry with equivalent bodies in those jurisdictions.
OSG contacts each previous employer directly, with specific focus on the safeguarding-relevant questions that reference letters rarely address: was the candidate ever the subject of a safeguarding concern or complaint? was the candidate ever asked to leave a post on conduct grounds, even if the departure was framed as voluntary? was the candidate ever moved away from direct access to children or vulnerable adults while employed? The answers surface patterns that a conventional reference check will not detect.
Teaching qualifications verified with the Ghana Education Service and the relevant colleges of education at source, not against copies supplied by the candidate. Nursing and allied health qualifications verified directly with the Nurses and Midwifery Council. Social work qualifications verified with the relevant regulatory body. Foreign qualifications verified at source with the originating institution — not merely authenticated by a stamp on a photocopy.
For roles with sustained direct access to children or vulnerable adults, OSG's psychological fitness assessment applies internationally validated instruments — including integrity psychometrics and clinical suitability assessment — to identify personality configurations and risk indicators associated with safeguarding failure. This is the same category of assessment that leading international safeguarding systems apply to the most sensitive care-giving roles.
Comprehensive adverse media review across Ghanaian, regional, and international sources — picking up press reports of disciplinary actions, investigations, or concerns that may never have resulted in formal conviction. Digital footprint analysis. And — within the bounds of legal consent and Ghana's Data Protection Act — discreet community-level enquiry in the candidate's home and professional community to surface the concerns that paper records often do not capture.
A single pre-appointment screen is not sufficient. OSG offers an annual re-screening programme for safeguarding-critical roles — matching the international standard, in which the adult who was cleared last year is re-verified this year, because circumstances change and new information emerges. Client employers receive a confidential safeguarding status report that allows them to meet their own governance and reputational obligations.
When assembled into an integrated safeguarding screening package, the OSG framework produces — in the Ghanaian context — an approximation of what a DBS Enhanced Check with Barred List verification delivers in the United Kingdom, or what a working WWCC clearance delivers in Australia. It is not a substitute for national infrastructure, and OSG publicly supports the establishment of a Ghana Sex Offenders Register as a matter of national priority. But in the meantime, it is the closest equivalent available to employers who are not willing to wait, and whose duty to the children and vulnerable adults in their care does not permit them to wait.
The Standard Ghana's Schools,
Care Facilities and Households Can Adopt Now
This brief is addressed to decision-makers: heads of schools, directors of children's homes, managing directors of hospitals, chairpersons of religious organisations, heads of household, and the boards that oversee them. The actions below are within the reach of any responsible employer, and do not require a change in national legislation to implement.
For Schools & Educational Institutions
Adopt a written safeguarding policy that applies to every appointment with access to students — teachers, boarders' masters, drivers, cleaners, security, external coaches. Require enhanced screening beyond police clearance for all appointments, calibrated to the specific safeguarding risk of the role. Implement annual re-screening for permanent staff. Maintain an internal safeguarding log. Train all staff on recognising and reporting safeguarding concerns. Require the same standard from external contractors.
For Children's Homes & Residential Care
Apply the highest level of safeguarding screening to every member of staff, resident volunteer, trustee, and regular visitor. Implement psychological fitness assessment for all care-giving roles. Maintain an independent safeguarding officer with direct reporting to the Board. Conduct quarterly reviews of the safeguarding log. Treat a single substantiated concern as a mandatory cause for dismissal, not a reputational problem to be contained.
For Hospitals & Healthcare Facilities
Require credential verification at source with the Nurses and Midwifery Council, the Medical and Dental Council, and equivalent foreign bodies for every clinical appointment. Apply enhanced safeguarding screening to staff working in paediatrics, maternity, mental health, geriatric care, and disability services. Maintain a named safeguarding lead within the facility. Implement mandatory safeguarding training for all staff — clinical and non-clinical alike.
For High-Net-Worth Households
Apply professional safeguarding screening to every member of domestic staff who will have direct or unsupervised access to children, elderly, or cognitively impaired family members. This is the single most important due diligence step a family can take, and the one most often skipped. OSG's Domestic Staff Screening package is designed precisely for this purpose and operates under strict confidentiality and Ghana Data Protection Act compliance.
Comprehensive safeguarding screening in Ghana — including enhanced regulatory inquiry, safeguarding-specific reference checks, credential source verification, psychological assessment, and adverse media review — costs between GHS 1,800 and GHS 4,500 per candidate depending on role and risk profile. This is not a trivial sum. It is, however, materially less than the cost of a single safeguarding incident — measured in harm to the child or vulnerable adult, in legal exposure to the institution, and in the reputational destruction that follows even one substantiated case. The cost of not screening is not a saving.
The Responsibility Is
Not Optional.
A national Sex Offenders Register for Ghana is a worthy goal, and OSG supports every serious effort to establish one. But that advocacy cannot become an excuse for inaction at the institutional level. Every day that responsible employers continue to hire for safeguarding-critical roles using only a police clearance certificate is a day on which Ghana's children and vulnerable adults are less protected than they would be under almost any comparable national framework.
The gap cannot be closed tomorrow by the state. It can be closed today, one employer at a time, by the institutions and households that understand what is at stake — and that refuse to outsource a duty they cannot delegate.
"The absence of a national register is not the end of the safeguarding argument. It is the beginning of the responsible employer's duty to build the protection that the state has not yet built."— OSG Intelligence Brief 12
Build Your Safeguarding Standard
Before You Need It.
Commission OSG's Safeguarding Screening for your school, care facility, hospital, or household. Or request a confidential Safeguarding Audit of your current hiring and monitoring practice — identifying where your specific organisation sits against international best practice and what needs to change.
Commission Safeguarding ScreeningRequest a Safeguarding AuditGhana does not have a Sex Offenders Register. Schools, children's homes, hospitals and care facilities across the country hire staff every day without the single database that almost every comparable country considers fundamental to protecting children and vulnerable adults from harm.
The Register Ghana Does Not Have.
This is a brief about the silence in Ghana's child and vulnerable-adult protection architecture — and about what organisations can do, today, to close that gap while the national infrastructure is still being built. It draws on the working models of South Africa, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Nigeria. And it proposes a private-sector safeguarding standard that Ghana's responsible employers can implement now, without waiting for the law to catch up.
A Protection Register That Does Not Exist
In August 2020, the Domestic Violence and Victims Support Unit (DOVVSU) of the Ghana Police Service publicly announced that the country would establish a Sex Offenders Register — to serve as a national reference point for the protection of children and vulnerable adults. The announcement was welcomed. Years on, the register remains on the drawing board. No public database exists. No employer of teachers, caregivers, or domestic staff in Ghana can check a candidate's name against a national list of persons convicted of sexual offences against children or vulnerable adults, because that list does not exist in an accessible form.
This is not a technical detail. It is a structural gap in Ghana's safeguarding architecture that has consequences every day — in schools, children's homes, hospitals, places of worship, and private households where vulnerable people are cared for by adults whose history cannot be independently verified against the single record that matters most.
"We don't have one specifically for rape convicts, but we intend to do that going forward. It is on the drawing board, to establish a register for people who have been convicted of rape which among other things is to serve as a reference point."— Chief Superintendent Owusua Kyeremeh, National Coordinator, DOVVSU, August 2020
Average annual incidence rate of recorded child rape per 100,000 girls up to age 19 in Ghana, 2010–2014, according to the Domestic Violence and Victims Support Unit. Reported cases only. The actual rate is widely believed to be many times higher.
A Plan Ghana study conducted in Awutu Senya, Effutu and Upper Manya Krobo Districts found that approximately 14% of female students and 10% of male students reported having been sexually abused — by classmates, teachers, and relatives.
Among survivors in the Plan Ghana study who identified their abusers, 21% named teachers as among the perpetrators. Teachers sit alongside classmates, neighbours, and relatives as the adults children most commonly report having been abused by.
Statistics on sexual offences are notoriously under-reported everywhere in the world. In Ghana — where stigma, family pressure to withdraw complaints, long-delayed justice and limited institutional response frequently discourage reporting — the true scale is almost certainly a significant multiple of what is recorded. OSG cites only figures that have been independently documented by Ghana Police, DOVVSU, or peer-reviewed academic research. Where numbers are uncertain, we say so. The underlying reality is not uncertain: the gap between recorded cases and actual incidence is wide, and the recorded cases alone are more than sufficient to justify comprehensive safeguarding screening.
A Police Clearance Certificate Is
Not a Safeguarding Check.
Every school, children's home, hospital, rehabilitation centre, boarding house, Sunday school, and high-net-worth household in Ghana relies — at the point of hiring — on a Ghana Police Criminal Records Bureau clearance, a reference letter, and a CV. This is the safeguarding infrastructure. None of these instruments is designed to do what a Sex Offenders Register or a Barred List does. The gap between what these instruments provide and what safeguarding actually requires is the gap in which harm to vulnerable people is enabled.
Not Concerns, Referrals, or Barring.
A Ghana Police clearance certificate confirms whether the individual has a recorded criminal conviction. It does not capture: allegations that were investigated but not prosecuted; safeguarding referrals made by previous employers; disciplinary findings by professional bodies; dismissals for conduct concerns; or concerns raised by children, parents, or other staff that never reached the criminal justice system. In the UK system, most people barred from working with children were barred on the basis of non-conviction information — safeguarding referrals and disciplinary findings. That entire category of risk is invisible to a Ghana police clearance.
The pattern is documented across every jurisdiction that has studied institutional abuse. An individual dismissed from one school for conduct concerns — without a criminal conviction — simply applies for a post at the next school, where the concerns are invisible. Without a national register or barred list, nothing in the hiring process is designed to detect this pattern. In the United States, the Government Accountability Office documented 15 cases of individuals with histories of sexual misconduct who were hired or retained by public and private schools as teachers, administrators, and volunteers — specifically because the safeguarding information was not systematically captured and made accessible to employers.
Ghana hosts significant numbers of foreign nationals working in education, healthcare, religious institutions, development agencies, and private care. A Ghana police clearance captures convictions within Ghana. It does not capture convictions in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa, or any other jurisdiction. An individual barred from working with children in their country of origin can — unless specifically asked and their answer independently verified — secure a position in Ghana working with children, without the red flag ever surfacing.
Teaching qualifications, nursing licences, social work certifications, and childcare credentials are frequently fabricated or fraudulently obtained in Ghana — a pattern OSG has covered in prior briefs. The individual presenting themselves as a qualified teacher or caregiver may not only lack legitimate credentials but may have been struck off or disciplined under a different name or a prior credential. Without source verification and — where professional regulation exists — a direct check against the regulatory body, the person standing in front of a child or a vulnerable adult may be someone entirely different from the person the CV describes.
The absence of a Sex Offenders Register in Ghana is not a reason to lower the safeguarding standard. It is a reason to raise the rigour of the due diligence that employers in care settings apply — because the national safety net most countries rely on simply is not there to catch the person who slips through. The burden of protection falls on the employer, the school, the home, the hospital, the household — and on the professional firms they engage to do what the state is not yet equipped to do.
How Other Countries
Have Built This.
Ghana is not the first country to recognise that a fragmented approach to safeguarding puts children and vulnerable adults at risk. The countries below have each, over decades and in response to specific national incidents, built structured systems that either register sex offenders or actively bar unsuitable persons from working with vulnerable people. Each model has strengths and weaknesses. Together, they provide a clear picture of what the state-level infrastructure can look like — and what, in the interim, Ghanaian organisations can adapt into their own private-sector safeguarding practice.
South Africa's NRSO was established by an Act of Parliament in 2007 and expanded in 2021 to cover offences against all vulnerable persons, not only children and persons with mental disabilities. The register is a record of names of those found guilty of sexual offences against vulnerable persons — whether the offence was committed inside or outside South Africa. It creates a legal obligation on employers in both the public and private sector to check whether a person being hired is fit to work with vulnerable people.
As of early 2025, the register held 32,501 active offenders, with a further 10,325 under consideration for inclusion. Individuals listed on the NRSO are barred from employment giving access to vulnerable persons, and are prohibited from fostering or adopting children. The register is not currently open to the general public — a matter of active legislative debate in South Africa — but is accessible to employers under a controlled procedure. A parallel National Child Protection Register operates under the Children's Act of 2005 and maintains Part B: persons found by a court to be unsuitable to work with children.
The UK's Disclosure and Barring Service is arguably the most developed safeguarding vetting system in operation. It was formed in 2012 by merging the Criminal Records Bureau and the Independent Safeguarding Authority. The DBS does two things: it provides four tiers of criminal record disclosure, and it maintains two Barred Lists — the Children's Barred List and the Adults' Barred List. A person on either Barred List is legally prohibited from working in "regulated activity" with that group, and it is a criminal offence for an employer to knowingly employ a barred person in regulated activity.
The Enhanced DBS Check — required for teachers, healthcare staff, childcare workers, and anyone working with vulnerable groups — includes criminal conviction history, cautions, and non-conviction information held by relevant police forces that the Chief Police Officer considers should be disclosed. Employers, regulatory bodies, and volunteer managers have a legal duty to refer to DBS any safeguarding concern that meets the threshold, meaning the system captures concerns that never reach the criminal justice system.
Australia operates a state-based system of Working with Children Checks — a mandatory, portable, employee-held clearance that allows the holder to engage in child-related work. Each state maintains its own check (WWCC in New South Wales and Victoria, Blue Card in Queensland, Working with Vulnerable People Check in ACT) but the underlying principle is consistent: the individual, not the employer, holds the check; the check is rigorous and periodic; and the check is a legal precondition to child-related work.
A Working with Children Check assesses national criminal history, findings of professional misconduct, reportable conduct — including misconduct that did not result in a criminal conviction — and any disciplinary information held by professional regulators. The system includes continuous monitoring: if relevant new information emerges during the validity period of a check, the check can be revoked. Crucially, the individual carries their clearance across employers — reducing the friction of recruitment while maintaining the protective standard. This is a model particularly well-suited to jurisdictions with large informal or self-employed caregiving sectors.
Nigeria's Sex Offenders Database is operated by the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP) and was established to document reported, arraigned, and convicted sex offences as defined under the Violence Against Persons (Prohibition) Act 2015. The register is notable in the African context for being partially publicly accessible: data on those convicted is available directly on the NSOD website, while data on reported or arraigned but not yet convicted cases is available on a controlled-access basis.
The Nigerian model is particularly useful as a reference for Ghana because of the shared regional context, comparable legal tradition, and the practical design choice to make conviction data public while protecting non-conviction data through controlled access. The register also operates a parallel registry of service providers and NGOs that offer safeguarding services — a feature relevant to Ghana as the domestic safeguarding ecosystem develops. The Nigerian experience demonstrates that West African jurisdictions can operate functional sex offender registers; the absence of one in Ghana is not a regional inevitability.
Across every working model — South Africa, the UK, Australia, Nigeria, and numerous others — three features recur. First, the system captures non-conviction information: safeguarding concerns, disciplinary findings, and protective barrings that never reached the criminal courts. Second, there is a legal obligation on employers in regulated activity to check against the register or barred list before appointment. Third, there are periodic updates — the system does not treat a single clean check as a permanent clearance. Every feature addresses a specific failure mode that a simple criminal record check cannot address. And every feature is implementable, in some form, inside a private-sector safeguarding framework even before national legislation catches up.
The Sectors Where Ghana's
Safeguarding Silence Matters Most
In each of the following sectors, children or vulnerable adults are placed daily in the care of adults whose full safeguarding history cannot currently be verified in Ghana. Each of these sectors is a place where the responsible employer should be applying a standard of pre-appointment and periodic screening that compensates for the absence of national infrastructure.
Basic schools, junior and senior high schools, boarding houses, private international schools, tuition and extra-curricular providers, sports coaches, music and arts instructors, boarding-house masters and mistresses. Every adult with sustained access to children in an educational capacity. Ghana's Plan Ghana research identifies teachers as among the top-reported perpetrators of sexual abuse in school settings.
Residential care providers, orphanages, group homes, rehabilitation facilities for children, transitional homes. Children in residential care are among the most vulnerable in any society — separated from family networks, often traumatised before arrival, and dependent on institutional staff for basic protection. The screening standard for residential childcare personnel must be uncompromising.
Paediatric and maternity wards, mental health facilities, special-needs care providers, facilities serving elderly or cognitively impaired patients. Healthcare staff routinely have intimate access to vulnerable patients with limited capacity to report harm. The combination of physical access, psychological authority, and diminished capacity to report makes this a category requiring enhanced safeguarding rigour.
Churches, mosques, Sunday schools, youth fellowships, religious camps, choirs, religious boarding programmes. Institutional religious settings have historically been among the environments where safeguarding failures have produced some of the most serious documented cases of institutional abuse worldwide. Ghana's religious institutions are no exception to the pattern, and the safeguarding standard applied should not be either.
House-helps, nannies, drivers, security personnel, gardeners, tutors, and private caregivers working inside the homes of high-net-worth families in Accra, Kumasi, Takoradi, and the diaspora's Ghanaian bases. The private household is the least-regulated safeguarding environment of all — and often the one with the longest, most intimate, and most unsupervised access to children and vulnerable elders.
Football academies, martial arts instructors, dance teachers, music tutors, drama coaches, scouts and youth movement leaders, summer camp operators. Adult-child relationships built on mentorship, physical contact, and out-of-school authority. Globally, extracurricular settings have produced a disproportionate share of documented abuse cases — because the adult enjoys authority without the institutional scrutiny of a school.
Whose Protection This Brief
Is Actually About
The analytical case for comprehensive safeguarding screening is made throughout this brief in institutional and operational terms. But the institutions and operations exist for one purpose only: to protect specific categories of human beings whose vulnerability the rest of us are collectively responsible for addressing.
Every child in a Ghanaian classroom, hostel, boarding house, or after-school programme — who has no means of independently verifying that the adult in front of them is fit to be there.
Every child in an orphanage, a children's home, a rehabilitation centre, a foster arrangement — children already made vulnerable by circumstance, for whom institutional protection is the primary safety net.
Adults with intellectual or cognitive disabilities, elderly patients with dementia, psychiatric inpatients, and individuals under sedation or post-operative care — whose capacity to report harm is itself compromised.
The child in a household where domestic staff have sustained, unsupervised, intimate access — where the employer's due diligence is often the only line of protection, and where the consequence of its absence is measured in a child's life.
"Vulnerable children and adults in Ghana are protected today by the goodwill of responsible employers, the diligence of individual caregivers, and the presence of family members watching. They are not protected by a system. Until they are, the responsible employer must become the system."— OSG Intelligence Brief 12
What OSG Offers in the Absence
of a National Register
OSG has designed a comprehensive safeguarding assessment framework specifically calibrated for the Ghanaian context — for employers in education, care, healthcare, religious institutions, domestic households, and youth programmes who cannot wait for national infrastructure to close the gap. The framework incorporates the operational lessons of the South African NRSO, the UK DBS, the Australian WWCC, and the Nigerian NSOD, adapted for the specific instruments and records available in Ghana today.
Beyond the standard Ghana Police clearance, OSG conducts enhanced inquiry with the Domestic Violence and Victims Support Unit (where legal consent permits), with the Ghana Education Service for teacher disciplinary records, with the Nurses and Midwifery Council of Ghana and the Medical and Dental Council for health professional conduct records, and with the Department of Social Welfare where foster or childcare licensing exists. Where the candidate has lived or worked abroad, OSG conducts parallel inquiry with equivalent bodies in those jurisdictions.
OSG contacts each previous employer directly, with specific focus on the safeguarding-relevant questions that reference letters rarely address: was the candidate ever the subject of a safeguarding concern or complaint? was the candidate ever asked to leave a post on conduct grounds, even if the departure was framed as voluntary? was the candidate ever moved away from direct access to children or vulnerable adults while employed? The answers surface patterns that a conventional reference check will not detect.
Teaching qualifications verified with the Ghana Education Service and the relevant colleges of education at source, not against copies supplied by the candidate. Nursing and allied health qualifications verified directly with the Nurses and Midwifery Council. Social work qualifications verified with the relevant regulatory body. Foreign qualifications verified at source with the originating institution — not merely authenticated by a stamp on a photocopy.
For roles with sustained direct access to children or vulnerable adults, OSG's psychological fitness assessment applies internationally validated instruments — including integrity psychometrics and clinical suitability assessment — to identify personality configurations and risk indicators associated with safeguarding failure. This is the same category of assessment that leading international safeguarding systems apply to the most sensitive care-giving roles.
Comprehensive adverse media review across Ghanaian, regional, and international sources — picking up press reports of disciplinary actions, investigations, or concerns that may never have resulted in formal conviction. Digital footprint analysis. And — within the bounds of legal consent and Ghana's Data Protection Act — discreet community-level enquiry in the candidate's home and professional community to surface the concerns that paper records often do not capture.
A single pre-appointment screen is not sufficient. OSG offers an annual re-screening programme for safeguarding-critical roles — matching the international standard, in which the adult who was cleared last year is re-verified this year, because circumstances change and new information emerges. Client employers receive a confidential safeguarding status report that allows them to meet their own governance and reputational obligations.
When assembled into an integrated safeguarding screening package, the OSG framework produces — in the Ghanaian context — an approximation of what a DBS Enhanced Check with Barred List verification delivers in the United Kingdom, or what a working WWCC clearance delivers in Australia. It is not a substitute for national infrastructure, and OSG publicly supports the establishment of a Ghana Sex Offenders Register as a matter of national priority. But in the meantime, it is the closest equivalent available to employers who are not willing to wait, and whose duty to the children and vulnerable adults in their care does not permit them to wait.
The Standard Ghana's Schools,
Care Facilities and Households Can Adopt Now
This brief is addressed to decision-makers: heads of schools, directors of children's homes, managing directors of hospitals, chairpersons of religious organisations, heads of household, and the boards that oversee them. The actions below are within the reach of any responsible employer, and do not require a change in national legislation to implement.
For Schools & Educational Institutions
Adopt a written safeguarding policy that applies to every appointment with access to students — teachers, boarders' masters, drivers, cleaners, security, external coaches. Require enhanced screening beyond police clearance for all appointments, calibrated to the specific safeguarding risk of the role. Implement annual re-screening for permanent staff. Maintain an internal safeguarding log. Train all staff on recognising and reporting safeguarding concerns. Require the same standard from external contractors.
For Children's Homes & Residential Care
Apply the highest level of safeguarding screening to every member of staff, resident volunteer, trustee, and regular visitor. Implement psychological fitness assessment for all care-giving roles. Maintain an independent safeguarding officer with direct reporting to the Board. Conduct quarterly reviews of the safeguarding log. Treat a single substantiated concern as a mandatory cause for dismissal, not a reputational problem to be contained.
For Hospitals & Healthcare Facilities
Require credential verification at source with the Nurses and Midwifery Council, the Medical and Dental Council, and equivalent foreign bodies for every clinical appointment. Apply enhanced safeguarding screening to staff working in paediatrics, maternity, mental health, geriatric care, and disability services. Maintain a named safeguarding lead within the facility. Implement mandatory safeguarding training for all staff — clinical and non-clinical alike.
For High-Net-Worth Households
Apply professional safeguarding screening to every member of domestic staff who will have direct or unsupervised access to children, elderly, or cognitively impaired family members. This is the single most important due diligence step a family can take, and the one most often skipped. OSG's Domestic Staff Screening package is designed precisely for this purpose and operates under strict confidentiality and Ghana Data Protection Act compliance.
Comprehensive safeguarding screening in Ghana — including enhanced regulatory inquiry, safeguarding-specific reference checks, credential source verification, psychological assessment, and adverse media review — costs between GHS 1,800 and GHS 4,500 per candidate depending on role and risk profile. This is not a trivial sum. It is, however, materially less than the cost of a single safeguarding incident — measured in harm to the child or vulnerable adult, in legal exposure to the institution, and in the reputational destruction that follows even one substantiated case. The cost of not screening is not a saving.
The Responsibility Is
Not Optional.
A national Sex Offenders Register for Ghana is a worthy goal, and OSG supports every serious effort to establish one. But that advocacy cannot become an excuse for inaction at the institutional level. Every day that responsible employers continue to hire for safeguarding-critical roles using only a police clearance certificate is a day on which Ghana's children and vulnerable adults are less protected than they would be under almost any comparable national framework.
The gap cannot be closed tomorrow by the state. It can be closed today, one employer at a time, by the institutions and households that understand what is at stake — and that refuse to outsource a duty they cannot delegate.
"The absence of a national register is not the end of the safeguarding argument. It is the beginning of the responsible employer's duty to build the protection that the state has not yet built."— OSG Intelligence Brief 12
Build Your Safeguarding Standard
Before You Need It.
Commission OSG's Safeguarding Screening for your school, care facility, hospital, or household. Or request a confidential Safeguarding Audit of your current hiring and monitoring practice — identifying where your specific organisation sits against international best practice and what needs to change.
Commission Safeguarding Screening Request a Safeguarding AuditGhana does not have a Sex Offenders Register. Schools, children's homes, hospitals and care facilities across the country hire staff every day without the single database that almost every comparable country considers fundamental to protecting children and vulnerable adults from harm.
The Register Ghana Does Not Have.
This is a brief about the silence in Ghana's child and vulnerable-adult protection architecture — and about what organisations can do, today, to close that gap while the national infrastructure is still being built. It draws on the working models of South Africa, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Nigeria. And it proposes a private-sector safeguarding standard that Ghana's responsible employers can implement now, without waiting for the law to catch up.
A Protection Register That Does Not Exist
In August 2020, the Domestic Violence and Victims Support Unit (DOVVSU) of the Ghana Police Service publicly announced that the country would establish a Sex Offenders Register — to serve as a national reference point for the protection of children and vulnerable adults. The announcement was welcomed. Years on, the register remains on the drawing board. No public database exists. No employer of teachers, caregivers, or domestic staff in Ghana can check a candidate's name against a national list of persons convicted of sexual offences against children or vulnerable adults, because that list does not exist in an accessible form.
This is not a technical detail. It is a structural gap in Ghana's safeguarding architecture that has consequences every day — in schools, children's homes, hospitals, places of worship, and private households where vulnerable people are cared for by adults whose history cannot be independently verified against the single record that matters most.
"We don't have one specifically for rape convicts, but we intend to do that going forward. It is on the drawing board, to establish a register for people who have been convicted of rape which among other things is to serve as a reference point."— Chief Superintendent Owusua Kyeremeh, National Coordinator, DOVVSU, August 2020
Average annual incidence rate of recorded child rape per 100,000 girls up to age 19 in Ghana, 2010–2014, according to the Domestic Violence and Victims Support Unit. Reported cases only. The actual rate is widely believed to be many times higher.
A Plan Ghana study conducted in Awutu Senya, Effutu and Upper Manya Krobo Districts found that approximately 14% of female students and 10% of male students reported having been sexually abused — by classmates, teachers, and relatives.
Among survivors in the Plan Ghana study who identified their abusers, 21% named teachers as among the perpetrators. Teachers sit alongside classmates, neighbours, and relatives as the adults children most commonly report having been abused by.
Statistics on sexual offences are notoriously under-reported everywhere in the world. In Ghana — where stigma, family pressure to withdraw complaints, long-delayed justice and limited institutional response frequently discourage reporting — the true scale is almost certainly a significant multiple of what is recorded. OSG cites only figures that have been independently documented by Ghana Police, DOVVSU, or peer-reviewed academic research. Where numbers are uncertain, we say so. The underlying reality is not uncertain: the gap between recorded cases and actual incidence is wide, and the recorded cases alone are more than sufficient to justify comprehensive safeguarding screening.
A Police Clearance Certificate Is
Not a Safeguarding Check.
Every school, children's home, hospital, rehabilitation centre, boarding house, Sunday school, and high-net-worth household in Ghana relies — at the point of hiring — on a Ghana Police Criminal Records Bureau clearance, a reference letter, and a CV. This is the safeguarding infrastructure. None of these instruments is designed to do what a Sex Offenders Register or a Barred List does. The gap between what these instruments provide and what safeguarding actually requires is the gap in which harm to vulnerable people is enabled.
Not Concerns, Referrals, or Barring.
A Ghana Police clearance certificate confirms whether the individual has a recorded criminal conviction. It does not capture: allegations that were investigated but not prosecuted; safeguarding referrals made by previous employers; disciplinary findings by professional bodies; dismissals for conduct concerns; or concerns raised by children, parents, or other staff that never reached the criminal justice system. In the UK system, most people barred from working with children were barred on the basis of non-conviction information — safeguarding referrals and disciplinary findings. That entire category of risk is invisible to a Ghana police clearance.
The pattern is documented across every jurisdiction that has studied institutional abuse. An individual dismissed from one school for conduct concerns — without a criminal conviction — simply applies for a post at the next school, where the concerns are invisible. Without a national register or barred list, nothing in the hiring process is designed to detect this pattern. In the United States, the Government Accountability Office documented 15 cases of individuals with histories of sexual misconduct who were hired or retained by public and private schools as teachers, administrators, and volunteers — specifically because the safeguarding information was not systematically captured and made accessible to employers.
Ghana hosts significant numbers of foreign nationals working in education, healthcare, religious institutions, development agencies, and private care. A Ghana police clearance captures convictions within Ghana. It does not capture convictions in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa, or any other jurisdiction. An individual barred from working with children in their country of origin can — unless specifically asked and their answer independently verified — secure a position in Ghana working with children, without the red flag ever surfacing.
Teaching qualifications, nursing licences, social work certifications, and childcare credentials are frequently fabricated or fraudulently obtained in Ghana — a pattern OSG has covered in prior briefs. The individual presenting themselves as a qualified teacher or caregiver may not only lack legitimate credentials but may have been struck off or disciplined under a different name or a prior credential. Without source verification and — where professional regulation exists — a direct check against the regulatory body, the person standing in front of a child or a vulnerable adult may be someone entirely different from the person the CV describes.
The absence of a Sex Offenders Register in Ghana is not a reason to lower the safeguarding standard. It is a reason to raise the rigour of the due diligence that employers in care settings apply — because the national safety net most countries rely on simply is not there to catch the person who slips through. The burden of protection falls on the employer, the school, the home, the hospital, the household — and on the professional firms they engage to do what the state is not yet equipped to do.
How Other Countries
Have Built This.
Ghana is not the first country to recognise that a fragmented approach to safeguarding puts children and vulnerable adults at risk. The countries below have each, over decades and in response to specific national incidents, built structured systems that either register sex offenders or actively bar unsuitable persons from working with vulnerable people. Each model has strengths and weaknesses. Together, they provide a clear picture of what the state-level infrastructure can look like — and what, in the interim, Ghanaian organisations can adapt into their own private-sector safeguarding practice.
South Africa's NRSO was established by an Act of Parliament in 2007 and expanded in 2021 to cover offences against all vulnerable persons, not only children and persons with mental disabilities. The register is a record of names of those found guilty of sexual offences against vulnerable persons — whether the offence was committed inside or outside South Africa. It creates a legal obligation on employers in both the public and private sector to check whether a person being hired is fit to work with vulnerable people.
As of early 2025, the register held 32,501 active offenders, with a further 10,325 under consideration for inclusion. Individuals listed on the NRSO are barred from employment giving access to vulnerable persons, and are prohibited from fostering or adopting children. The register is not currently open to the general public — a matter of active legislative debate in South Africa — but is accessible to employers under a controlled procedure. A parallel National Child Protection Register operates under the Children's Act of 2005 and maintains Part B: persons found by a court to be unsuitable to work with children.
The UK's Disclosure and Barring Service is arguably the most developed safeguarding vetting system in operation. It was formed in 2012 by merging the Criminal Records Bureau and the Independent Safeguarding Authority. The DBS does two things: it provides four tiers of criminal record disclosure, and it maintains two Barred Lists — the Children's Barred List and the Adults' Barred List. A person on either Barred List is legally prohibited from working in "regulated activity" with that group, and it is a criminal offence for an employer to knowingly employ a barred person in regulated activity.
The Enhanced DBS Check — required for teachers, healthcare staff, childcare workers, and anyone working with vulnerable groups — includes criminal conviction history, cautions, and non-conviction information held by relevant police forces that the Chief Police Officer considers should be disclosed. Employers, regulatory bodies, and volunteer managers have a legal duty to refer to DBS any safeguarding concern that meets the threshold, meaning the system captures concerns that never reach the criminal justice system.
Australia operates a state-based system of Working with Children Checks — a mandatory, portable, employee-held clearance that allows the holder to engage in child-related work. Each state maintains its own check (WWCC in New South Wales and Victoria, Blue Card in Queensland, Working with Vulnerable People Check in ACT) but the underlying principle is consistent: the individual, not the employer, holds the check; the check is rigorous and periodic; and the check is a legal precondition to child-related work.
A Working with Children Check assesses national criminal history, findings of professional misconduct, reportable conduct — including misconduct that did not result in a criminal conviction — and any disciplinary information held by professional regulators. The system includes continuous monitoring: if relevant new information emerges during the validity period of a check, the check can be revoked. Crucially, the individual carries their clearance across employers — reducing the friction of recruitment while maintaining the protective standard. This is a model particularly well-suited to jurisdictions with large informal or self-employed caregiving sectors.
Nigeria's Sex Offenders Database is operated by the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP) and was established to document reported, arraigned, and convicted sex offences as defined under the Violence Against Persons (Prohibition) Act 2015. The register is notable in the African context for being partially publicly accessible: data on those convicted is available directly on the NSOD website, while data on reported or arraigned but not yet convicted cases is available on a controlled-access basis.
The Nigerian model is particularly useful as a reference for Ghana because of the shared regional context, comparable legal tradition, and the practical design choice to make conviction data public while protecting non-conviction data through controlled access. The register also operates a parallel registry of service providers and NGOs that offer safeguarding services — a feature relevant to Ghana as the domestic safeguarding ecosystem develops. The Nigerian experience demonstrates that West African jurisdictions can operate functional sex offender registers; the absence of one in Ghana is not a regional inevitability.
Across every working model — South Africa, the UK, Australia, Nigeria, and numerous others — three features recur. First, the system captures non-conviction information: safeguarding concerns, disciplinary findings, and protective barrings that never reached the criminal courts. Second, there is a legal obligation on employers in regulated activity to check against the register or barred list before appointment. Third, there are periodic updates — the system does not treat a single clean check as a permanent clearance. Every feature addresses a specific failure mode that a simple criminal record check cannot address. And every feature is implementable, in some form, inside a private-sector safeguarding framework even before national legislation catches up.
The Sectors Where Ghana's
Safeguarding Silence Matters Most
In each of the following sectors, children or vulnerable adults are placed daily in the care of adults whose full safeguarding history cannot currently be verified in Ghana. Each of these sectors is a place where the responsible employer should be applying a standard of pre-appointment and periodic screening that compensates for the absence of national infrastructure.
Basic schools, junior and senior high schools, boarding houses, private international schools, tuition and extra-curricular providers, sports coaches, music and arts instructors, boarding-house masters and mistresses. Every adult with sustained access to children in an educational capacity. Ghana's Plan Ghana research identifies teachers as among the top-reported perpetrators of sexual abuse in school settings.
Residential care providers, orphanages, group homes, rehabilitation facilities for children, transitional homes. Children in residential care are among the most vulnerable in any society — separated from family networks, often traumatised before arrival, and dependent on institutional staff for basic protection. The screening standard for residential childcare personnel must be uncompromising.
Paediatric and maternity wards, mental health facilities, special-needs care providers, facilities serving elderly or cognitively impaired patients. Healthcare staff routinely have intimate access to vulnerable patients with limited capacity to report harm. The combination of physical access, psychological authority, and diminished capacity to report makes this a category requiring enhanced safeguarding rigour.
Churches, mosques, Sunday schools, youth fellowships, religious camps, choirs, religious boarding programmes. Institutional religious settings have historically been among the environments where safeguarding failures have produced some of the most serious documented cases of institutional abuse worldwide. Ghana's religious institutions are no exception to the pattern, and the safeguarding standard applied should not be either.
House-helps, nannies, drivers, security personnel, gardeners, tutors, and private caregivers working inside the homes of high-net-worth families in Accra, Kumasi, Takoradi, and the diaspora's Ghanaian bases. The private household is the least-regulated safeguarding environment of all — and often the one with the longest, most intimate, and most unsupervised access to children and vulnerable elders.
Football academies, martial arts instructors, dance teachers, music tutors, drama coaches, scouts and youth movement leaders, summer camp operators. Adult-child relationships built on mentorship, physical contact, and out-of-school authority. Globally, extracurricular settings have produced a disproportionate share of documented abuse cases — because the adult enjoys authority without the institutional scrutiny of a school.
Whose Protection This Brief
Is Actually About
The analytical case for comprehensive safeguarding screening is made throughout this brief in institutional and operational terms. But the institutions and operations exist for one purpose only: to protect specific categories of human beings whose vulnerability the rest of us are collectively responsible for addressing.
Every child in a Ghanaian classroom, hostel, boarding house, or after-school programme — who has no means of independently verifying that the adult in front of them is fit to be there.
Every child in an orphanage, a children's home, a rehabilitation centre, a foster arrangement — children already made vulnerable by circumstance, for whom institutional protection is the primary safety net.
Adults with intellectual or cognitive disabilities, elderly patients with dementia, psychiatric inpatients, and individuals under sedation or post-operative care — whose capacity to report harm is itself compromised.
The child in a household where domestic staff have sustained, unsupervised, intimate access — where the employer's due diligence is often the only line of protection, and where the consequence of its absence is measured in a child's life.
"Vulnerable children and adults in Ghana are protected today by the goodwill of responsible employers, the diligence of individual caregivers, and the presence of family members watching. They are not protected by a system. Until they are, the responsible employer must become the system."— OSG Intelligence Brief 12
What OSG Offers in the Absence
of a National Register
OSG has designed a comprehensive safeguarding assessment framework specifically calibrated for the Ghanaian context — for employers in education, care, healthcare, religious institutions, domestic households, and youth programmes who cannot wait for national infrastructure to close the gap. The framework incorporates the operational lessons of the South African NRSO, the UK DBS, the Australian WWCC, and the Nigerian NSOD, adapted for the specific instruments and records available in Ghana today.
Beyond the standard Ghana Police clearance, OSG conducts enhanced inquiry with the Domestic Violence and Victims Support Unit (where legal consent permits), with the Ghana Education Service for teacher disciplinary records, with the Nurses and Midwifery Council of Ghana and the Medical and Dental Council for health professional conduct records, and with the Department of Social Welfare where foster or childcare licensing exists. Where the candidate has lived or worked abroad, OSG conducts parallel inquiry with equivalent bodies in those jurisdictions.
OSG contacts each previous employer directly, with specific focus on the safeguarding-relevant questions that reference letters rarely address: was the candidate ever the subject of a safeguarding concern or complaint? was the candidate ever asked to leave a post on conduct grounds, even if the departure was framed as voluntary? was the candidate ever moved away from direct access to children or vulnerable adults while employed? The answers surface patterns that a conventional reference check will not detect.
Teaching qualifications verified with the Ghana Education Service and the relevant colleges of education at source, not against copies supplied by the candidate. Nursing and allied health qualifications verified directly with the Nurses and Midwifery Council. Social work qualifications verified with the relevant regulatory body. Foreign qualifications verified at source with the originating institution — not merely authenticated by a stamp on a photocopy.
For roles with sustained direct access to children or vulnerable adults, OSG's psychological fitness assessment applies internationally validated instruments — including integrity psychometrics and clinical suitability assessment — to identify personality configurations and risk indicators associated with safeguarding failure. This is the same category of assessment that leading international safeguarding systems apply to the most sensitive care-giving roles.
Comprehensive adverse media review across Ghanaian, regional, and international sources — picking up press reports of disciplinary actions, investigations, or concerns that may never have resulted in formal conviction. Digital footprint analysis. And — within the bounds of legal consent and Ghana's Data Protection Act — discreet community-level enquiry in the candidate's home and professional community to surface the concerns that paper records often do not capture.
A single pre-appointment screen is not sufficient. OSG offers an annual re-screening programme for safeguarding-critical roles — matching the international standard, in which the adult who was cleared last year is re-verified this year, because circumstances change and new information emerges. Client employers receive a confidential safeguarding status report that allows them to meet their own governance and reputational obligations.
When assembled into an integrated safeguarding screening package, the OSG framework produces — in the Ghanaian context — an approximation of what a DBS Enhanced Check with Barred List verification delivers in the United Kingdom, or what a working WWCC clearance delivers in Australia. It is not a substitute for national infrastructure, and OSG publicly supports the establishment of a Ghana Sex Offenders Register as a matter of national priority. But in the meantime, it is the closest equivalent available to employers who are not willing to wait, and whose duty to the children and vulnerable adults in their care does not permit them to wait.
The Standard Ghana's Schools,
Care Facilities and Households Can Adopt Now
This brief is addressed to decision-makers: heads of schools, directors of children's homes, managing directors of hospitals, chairpersons of religious organisations, heads of household, and the boards that oversee them. The actions below are within the reach of any responsible employer, and do not require a change in national legislation to implement.
For Schools & Educational Institutions
Adopt a written safeguarding policy that applies to every appointment with access to students — teachers, boarders' masters, drivers, cleaners, security, external coaches. Require enhanced screening beyond police clearance for all appointments, calibrated to the specific safeguarding risk of the role. Implement annual re-screening for permanent staff. Maintain an internal safeguarding log. Train all staff on recognising and reporting safeguarding concerns. Require the same standard from external contractors.
For Children's Homes & Residential Care
Apply the highest level of safeguarding screening to every member of staff, resident volunteer, trustee, and regular visitor. Implement psychological fitness assessment for all care-giving roles. Maintain an independent safeguarding officer with direct reporting to the Board. Conduct quarterly reviews of the safeguarding log. Treat a single substantiated concern as a mandatory cause for dismissal, not a reputational problem to be contained.
For Hospitals & Healthcare Facilities
Require credential verification at source with the Nurses and Midwifery Council, the Medical and Dental Council, and equivalent foreign bodies for every clinical appointment. Apply enhanced safeguarding screening to staff working in paediatrics, maternity, mental health, geriatric care, and disability services. Maintain a named safeguarding lead within the facility. Implement mandatory safeguarding training for all staff — clinical and non-clinical alike.
For High-Net-Worth Households
Apply professional safeguarding screening to every member of domestic staff who will have direct or unsupervised access to children, elderly, or cognitively impaired family members. This is the single most important due diligence step a family can take, and the one most often skipped. OSG's Domestic Staff Screening package is designed precisely for this purpose and operates under strict confidentiality and Ghana Data Protection Act compliance.
Comprehensive safeguarding screening in Ghana — including enhanced regulatory inquiry, safeguarding-specific reference checks, credential source verification, psychological assessment, and adverse media review — costs between GHS 1,800 and GHS 4,500 per candidate depending on role and risk profile. This is not a trivial sum. It is, however, materially less than the cost of a single safeguarding incident — measured in harm to the child or vulnerable adult, in legal exposure to the institution, and in the reputational destruction that follows even one substantiated case. The cost of not screening is not a saving.
The Responsibility Is
Not Optional.
A national Sex Offenders Register for Ghana is a worthy goal, and OSG supports every serious effort to establish one. But that advocacy cannot become an excuse for inaction at the institutional level. Every day that responsible employers continue to hire for safeguarding-critical roles using only a police clearance certificate is a day on which Ghana's children and vulnerable adults are less protected than they would be under almost any comparable national framework.
The gap cannot be closed tomorrow by the state. It can be closed today, one employer at a time, by the institutions and households that understand what is at stake — and that refuse to outsource a duty they cannot delegate.
"The absence of a national register is not the end of the safeguarding argument. It is the beginning of the responsible employer's duty to build the protection that the state has not yet built."— OSG Intelligence Brief 12
Build Your Safeguarding Standard
Before You Need It.
Commission OSG's Safeguarding Screening for your school, care facility, hospital, or household. Or request a confidential Safeguarding Audit of your current hiring and monitoring practice — identifying where your specific organisation sits against international best practice and what needs to change.
Commission Safeguarding Screening Request a Safeguarding AuditGhana does not have a Sex Offenders Register. Schools, children's homes, hospitals and care facilities across the country hire staff every day without the single database that almost every comparable country considers fundamental to protecting children and vulnerable adults from harm.
The RegisterGhana DoesNot Have.
This is a brief about the silence in Ghana's child and vulnerable-adult protection architecture — and about what organisations can do, today, to close that gap while the national infrastructure is still being built. It draws on the working models of South Africa, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Nigeria. And it proposes a private-sector safeguarding standard that Ghana's responsible employers can implement now, without waiting for the law to catch up.
A Protection Register That Does Not Exist
In August 2020, the Domestic Violence and Victims Support Unit (DOVVSU) of the Ghana Police Service publicly announced that the country would establish a Sex Offenders Register — to serve as a national reference point for the protection of children and vulnerable adults. The announcement was welcomed. Years on, the register remains on the drawing board. No public database exists. No employer of teachers, caregivers, or domestic staff in Ghana can check a candidate's name against a national list of persons convicted of sexual offences against children or vulnerable adults, because that list does not exist in an accessible form.
This is not a technical detail. It is a structural gap in Ghana's safeguarding architecture that has consequences every day — in schools, children's homes, hospitals, places of worship, and private households where vulnerable people are cared for by adults whose history cannot be independently verified against the single record that matters most.
"We don't have one specifically for rape convicts, but we intend to do that going forward. It is on the drawing board, to establish a register for people who have been convicted of rape which among other things is to serve as a reference point."— Chief Superintendent Owusua Kyeremeh, National Coordinator, DOVVSU, August 2020
Average annual incidence rate of recorded child rape per 100,000 girls up to age 19 in Ghana, 2010–2014, according to the Domestic Violence and Victims Support Unit. Reported cases only. The actual rate is widely believed to be many times higher.
A Plan Ghana study conducted in Awutu Senya, Effutu and Upper Manya Krobo Districts found that approximately 14% of female students and 10% of male students reported having been sexually abused — by classmates, teachers, and relatives.
Among survivors in the Plan Ghana study who identified their abusers, 21% named teachers as among the perpetrators. Teachers sit alongside classmates, neighbours, and relatives as the adults children most commonly report having been abused by.
Statistics on sexual offences are notoriously under-reported everywhere in the world. In Ghana — where stigma, family pressure to withdraw complaints, long-delayed justice and limited institutional response frequently discourage reporting — the true scale is almost certainly a significant multiple of what is recorded. OSG cites only figures that have been independently documented by Ghana Police, DOVVSU, or peer-reviewed academic research. Where numbers are uncertain, we say so. The underlying reality is not uncertain: the gap between recorded cases and actual incidence is wide, and the recorded cases alone are more than sufficient to justify comprehensive safeguarding screening.
A Police Clearance Certificate Is
Not a Safeguarding Check.
Every school, children's home, hospital, rehabilitation centre, boarding house, Sunday school, and high-net-worth household in Ghana relies — at the point of hiring — on a Ghana Police Criminal Records Bureau clearance, a reference letter, and a CV. This is the safeguarding infrastructure. None of these instruments is designed to do what a Sex Offenders Register or a Barred List does. The gap between what these instruments provide and what safeguarding actually requires is the gap in which harm to vulnerable people is enabled.
Not Concerns, Referrals, or Barring.
A Ghana Police clearance certificate confirms whether the individual has a recorded criminal conviction. It does not capture: allegations that were investigated but not prosecuted; safeguarding referrals made by previous employers; disciplinary findings by professional bodies; dismissals for conduct concerns; or concerns raised by children, parents, or other staff that never reached the criminal justice system. In the UK system, most people barred from working with children were barred on the basis of non-conviction information — safeguarding referrals and disciplinary findings. That entire category of risk is invisible to a Ghana police clearance.
The pattern is documented across every jurisdiction that has studied institutional abuse. An individual dismissed from one school for conduct concerns — without a criminal conviction — simply applies for a post at the next school, where the concerns are invisible. Without a national register or barred list, nothing in the hiring process is designed to detect this pattern. In the United States, the Government Accountability Office documented 15 cases of individuals with histories of sexual misconduct who were hired or retained by public and private schools as teachers, administrators, and volunteers — specifically because the safeguarding information was not systematically captured and made accessible to employers.
Ghana hosts significant numbers of foreign nationals working in education, healthcare, religious institutions, development agencies, and private care. A Ghana police clearance captures convictions within Ghana. It does not capture convictions in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa, or any other jurisdiction. An individual barred from working with children in their country of origin can — unless specifically asked and their answer independently verified — secure a position in Ghana working with children, without the red flag ever surfacing.
Teaching qualifications, nursing licences, social work certifications, and childcare credentials are frequently fabricated or fraudulently obtained in Ghana — a pattern OSG has covered in prior briefs. The individual presenting themselves as a qualified teacher or caregiver may not only lack legitimate credentials but may have been struck off or disciplined under a different name or a prior credential. Without source verification and — where professional regulation exists — a direct check against the regulatory body, the person standing in front of a child or a vulnerable adult may be someone entirely different from the person the CV describes.
The absence of a Sex Offenders Register in Ghana is not a reason to lower the safeguarding standard. It is a reason to raise the rigour of the due diligence that employers in care settings apply — because the national safety net most countries rely on simply is not there to catch the person who slips through. The burden of protection falls on the employer, the school, the home, the hospital, the household — and on the professional firms they engage to do what the state is not yet equipped to do.
How Other Countries
Have Built This.
Ghana is not the first country to recognise that a fragmented approach to safeguarding puts children and vulnerable adults at risk. The countries below have each, over decades and in response to specific national incidents, built structured systems that either register sex offenders or actively bar unsuitable persons from working with vulnerable people. Each model has strengths and weaknesses. Together, they provide a clear picture of what the state-level infrastructure can look like — and what, in the interim, Ghanaian organisations can adapt into their own private-sector safeguarding practice.
South Africa's NRSO was established by an Act of Parliament in 2007 and expanded in 2021 to cover offences against all vulnerable persons, not only children and persons with mental disabilities. The register is a record of names of those found guilty of sexual offences against vulnerable persons — whether the offence was committed inside or outside South Africa. It creates a legal obligation on employers in both the public and private sector to check whether a person being hired is fit to work with vulnerable people.
As of early 2025, the register held 32,501 active offenders, with a further 10,325 under consideration for inclusion. Individuals listed on the NRSO are barred from employment giving access to vulnerable persons, and are prohibited from fostering or adopting children. The register is not currently open to the general public — a matter of active legislative debate in South Africa — but is accessible to employers under a controlled procedure. A parallel National Child Protection Register operates under the Children's Act of 2005 and maintains Part B: persons found by a court to be unsuitable to work with children.
The UK's Disclosure and Barring Service is arguably the most developed safeguarding vetting system in operation. It was formed in 2012 by merging the Criminal Records Bureau and the Independent Safeguarding Authority. The DBS does two things: it provides four tiers of criminal record disclosure, and it maintains two Barred Lists — the Children's Barred List and the Adults' Barred List. A person on either Barred List is legally prohibited from working in "regulated activity" with that group, and it is a criminal offence for an employer to knowingly employ a barred person in regulated activity.
The Enhanced DBS Check — required for teachers, healthcare staff, childcare workers, and anyone working with vulnerable groups — includes criminal conviction history, cautions, and non-conviction information held by relevant police forces that the Chief Police Officer considers should be disclosed. Employers, regulatory bodies, and volunteer managers have a legal duty to refer to DBS any safeguarding concern that meets the threshold, meaning the system captures concerns that never reach the criminal justice system.
Australia operates a state-based system of Working with Children Checks — a mandatory, portable, employee-held clearance that allows the holder to engage in child-related work. Each state maintains its own check (WWCC in New South Wales and Victoria, Blue Card in Queensland, Working with Vulnerable People Check in ACT) but the underlying principle is consistent: the individual, not the employer, holds the check; the check is rigorous and periodic; and the check is a legal precondition to child-related work.
A Working with Children Check assesses national criminal history, findings of professional misconduct, reportable conduct — including misconduct that did not result in a criminal conviction — and any disciplinary information held by professional regulators. The system includes continuous monitoring: if relevant new information emerges during the validity period of a check, the check can be revoked. Crucially, the individual carries their clearance across employers — reducing the friction of recruitment while maintaining the protective standard. This is a model particularly well-suited to jurisdictions with large informal or self-employed caregiving sectors.
Nigeria's Sex Offenders Database is operated by the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP) and was established to document reported, arraigned, and convicted sex offences as defined under the Violence Against Persons (Prohibition) Act 2015. The register is notable in the African context for being partially publicly accessible: data on those convicted is available directly on the NSOD website, while data on reported or arraigned but not yet convicted cases is available on a controlled-access basis.
The Nigerian model is particularly useful as a reference for Ghana because of the shared regional context, comparable legal tradition, and the practical design choice to make conviction data public while protecting non-conviction data through controlled access. The register also operates a parallel registry of service providers and NGOs that offer safeguarding services — a feature relevant to Ghana as the domestic safeguarding ecosystem develops. The Nigerian experience demonstrates that West African jurisdictions can operate functional sex offender registers; the absence of one in Ghana is not a regional inevitability.
Across every working model — South Africa, the UK, Australia, Nigeria, and numerous others — three features recur. First, the system captures non-conviction information: safeguarding concerns, disciplinary findings, and protective barrings that never reached the criminal courts. Second, there is a legal obligation on employers in regulated activity to check against the register or barred list before appointment. Third, there are periodic updates — the system does not treat a single clean check as a permanent clearance. Every feature addresses a specific failure mode that a simple criminal record check cannot address. And every feature is implementable, in some form, inside a private-sector safeguarding framework even before national legislation catches up.
The Sectors Where Ghana's
Safeguarding Silence Matters Most
In each of the following sectors, children or vulnerable adults are placed daily in the care of adults whose full safeguarding history cannot currently be verified in Ghana. Each of these sectors is a place where the responsible employer should be applying a standard of pre-appointment and periodic screening that compensates for the absence of national infrastructure.
Basic schools, junior and senior high schools, boarding houses, private international schools, tuition and extra-curricular providers, sports coaches, music and arts instructors, boarding-house masters and mistresses. Every adult with sustained access to children in an educational capacity. Ghana's Plan Ghana research identifies teachers as among the top-reported perpetrators of sexual abuse in school settings.
Residential care providers, orphanages, group homes, rehabilitation facilities for children, transitional homes. Children in residential care are among the most vulnerable in any society — separated from family networks, often traumatised before arrival, and dependent on institutional staff for basic protection. The screening standard for residential childcare personnel must be uncompromising.
Paediatric and maternity wards, mental health facilities, special-needs care providers, facilities serving elderly or cognitively impaired patients. Healthcare staff routinely have intimate access to vulnerable patients with limited capacity to report harm. The combination of physical access, psychological authority, and diminished capacity to report makes this a category requiring enhanced safeguarding rigour.
Churches, mosques, Sunday schools, youth fellowships, religious camps, choirs, religious boarding programmes. Institutional religious settings have historically been among the environments where safeguarding failures have produced some of the most serious documented cases of institutional abuse worldwide. Ghana's religious institutions are no exception to the pattern, and the safeguarding standard applied should not be either.
House-helps, nannies, drivers, security personnel, gardeners, tutors, and private caregivers working inside the homes of high-net-worth families in Accra, Kumasi, Takoradi, and the diaspora's Ghanaian bases. The private household is the least-regulated safeguarding environment of all — and often the one with the longest, most intimate, and most unsupervised access to children and vulnerable elders.
Football academies, martial arts instructors, dance teachers, music tutors, drama coaches, scouts and youth movement leaders, summer camp operators. Adult-child relationships built on mentorship, physical contact, and out-of-school authority. Globally, extracurricular settings have produced a disproportionate share of documented abuse cases — because the adult enjoys authority without the institutional scrutiny of a school.
Whose Protection This Brief
Is Actually About
The analytical case for comprehensive safeguarding screening is made throughout this brief in institutional and operational terms. But the institutions and operations exist for one purpose only: to protect specific categories of human beings whose vulnerability the rest of us are collectively responsible for addressing.
Every child in a Ghanaian classroom, hostel, boarding house, or after-school programme — who has no means of independently verifying that the adult in front of them is fit to be there.
Every child in an orphanage, a children's home, a rehabilitation centre, a foster arrangement — children already made vulnerable by circumstance, for whom institutional protection is the primary safety net.
Adults with intellectual or cognitive disabilities, elderly patients with dementia, psychiatric inpatients, and individuals under sedation or post-operative care — whose capacity to report harm is itself compromised.
The child in a household where domestic staff have sustained, unsupervised, intimate access — where the employer's due diligence is often the only line of protection, and where the consequence of its absence is measured in a child's life.
"Vulnerable children and adults in Ghana are protected today by the goodwill of responsible employers, the diligence of individual caregivers, and the presence of family members watching. They are not protected by a system. Until they are, the responsible employer must become the system."— OSG Intelligence Brief 12
What OSG Offers in the Absence
of a National Register
OSG has designed a comprehensive safeguarding assessment framework specifically calibrated for the Ghanaian context — for employers in education, care, healthcare, religious institutions, domestic households, and youth programmes who cannot wait for national infrastructure to close the gap. The framework incorporates the operational lessons of the South African NRSO, the UK DBS, the Australian WWCC, and the Nigerian NSOD, adapted for the specific instruments and records available in Ghana today.
Beyond the standard Ghana Police clearance, OSG conducts enhanced inquiry with the Domestic Violence and Victims Support Unit (where legal consent permits), with the Ghana Education Service for teacher disciplinary records, with the Nurses and Midwifery Council of Ghana and the Medical and Dental Council for health professional conduct records, and with the Department of Social Welfare where foster or childcare licensing exists. Where the candidate has lived or worked abroad, OSG conducts parallel inquiry with equivalent bodies in those jurisdictions.
OSG contacts each previous employer directly, with specific focus on the safeguarding-relevant questions that reference letters rarely address: was the candidate ever the subject of a safeguarding concern or complaint? was the candidate ever asked to leave a post on conduct grounds, even if the departure was framed as voluntary? was the candidate ever moved away from direct access to children or vulnerable adults while employed? The answers surface patterns that a conventional reference check will not detect.
Teaching qualifications verified with the Ghana Education Service and the relevant colleges of education at source, not against copies supplied by the candidate. Nursing and allied health qualifications verified directly with the Nurses and Midwifery Council. Social work qualifications verified with the relevant regulatory body. Foreign qualifications verified at source with the originating institution — not merely authenticated by a stamp on a photocopy.
For roles with sustained direct access to children or vulnerable adults, OSG's psychological fitness assessment applies internationally validated instruments — including integrity psychometrics and clinical suitability assessment — to identify personality configurations and risk indicators associated with safeguarding failure. This is the same category of assessment that leading international safeguarding systems apply to the most sensitive care-giving roles.
Comprehensive adverse media review across Ghanaian, regional, and international sources — picking up press reports of disciplinary actions, investigations, or concerns that may never have resulted in formal conviction. Digital footprint analysis. And — within the bounds of legal consent and Ghana's Data Protection Act — discreet community-level enquiry in the candidate's home and professional community to surface the concerns that paper records often do not capture.
A single pre-appointment screen is not sufficient. OSG offers an annual re-screening programme for safeguarding-critical roles — matching the international standard, in which the adult who was cleared last year is re-verified this year, because circumstances change and new information emerges. Client employers receive a confidential safeguarding status report that allows them to meet their own governance and reputational obligations.
When assembled into an integrated safeguarding screening package, the OSG framework produces — in the Ghanaian context — an approximation of what a DBS Enhanced Check with Barred List verification delivers in the United Kingdom, or what a working WWCC clearance delivers in Australia. It is not a substitute for national infrastructure, and OSG publicly supports the establishment of a Ghana Sex Offenders Register as a matter of national priority. But in the meantime, it is the closest equivalent available to employers who are not willing to wait, and whose duty to the children and vulnerable adults in their care does not permit them to wait.
The Standard Ghana's Schools,
Care Facilities and Households Can Adopt Now
This brief is addressed to decision-makers: heads of schools, directors of children's homes, managing directors of hospitals, chairpersons of religious organisations, heads of household, and the boards that oversee them. The actions below are within the reach of any responsible employer, and do not require a change in national legislation to implement.
For Schools & Educational Institutions
Adopt a written safeguarding policy that applies to every appointment with access to students — teachers, boarders' masters, drivers, cleaners, security, external coaches. Require enhanced screening beyond police clearance for all appointments, calibrated to the specific safeguarding risk of the role. Implement annual re-screening for permanent staff. Maintain an internal safeguarding log. Train all staff on recognising and reporting safeguarding concerns. Require the same standard from external contractors.
For Children's Homes & Residential Care
Apply the highest level of safeguarding screening to every member of staff, resident volunteer, trustee, and regular visitor. Implement psychological fitness assessment for all care-giving roles. Maintain an independent safeguarding officer with direct reporting to the Board. Conduct quarterly reviews of the safeguarding log. Treat a single substantiated concern as a mandatory cause for dismissal, not a reputational problem to be contained.
For Hospitals & Healthcare Facilities
Require credential verification at source with the Nurses and Midwifery Council, the Medical and Dental Council, and equivalent foreign bodies for every clinical appointment. Apply enhanced safeguarding screening to staff working in paediatrics, maternity, mental health, geriatric care, and disability services. Maintain a named safeguarding lead within the facility. Implement mandatory safeguarding training for all staff — clinical and non-clinical alike.
For High-Net-Worth Households
Apply professional safeguarding screening to every member of domestic staff who will have direct or unsupervised access to children, elderly, or cognitively impaired family members. This is the single most important due diligence step a family can take, and the one most often skipped. OSG's Domestic Staff Screening package is designed precisely for this purpose and operates under strict confidentiality and Ghana Data Protection Act compliance.
Comprehensive safeguarding screening in Ghana — including enhanced regulatory inquiry, safeguarding-specific reference checks, credential source verification, psychological assessment, and adverse media review — costs between GHS 1,800 and GHS 4,500 per candidate depending on role and risk profile. This is not a trivial sum. It is, however, materially less than the cost of a single safeguarding incident — measured in harm to the child or vulnerable adult, in legal exposure to the institution, and in the reputational destruction that follows even one substantiated case. The cost of not screening is not a saving.
The Responsibility Is
Not Optional.
A national Sex Offenders Register for Ghana is a worthy goal, and OSG supports every serious effort to establish one. But that advocacy cannot become an excuse for inaction at the institutional level. Every day that responsible employers continue to hire for safeguarding-critical roles using only a police clearance certificate is a day on which Ghana's children and vulnerable adults are less protected than they would be under almost any comparable national framework.
The gap cannot be closed tomorrow by the state. It can be closed today, one employer at a time, by the institutions and households that understand what is at stake — and that refuse to outsource a duty they cannot delegate.
"The absence of a national register is not the end of the safeguarding argument. It is the beginning of the responsible employer's duty to build the protection that the state has not yet built."— OSG Intelligence Brief 12
Build Your Safeguarding Standard
Before You Need It.
Commission OSG's Safeguarding Screening for your school, care facility, hospital, or household. Or request a confidential Safeguarding Audit of your current hiring and monitoring practice — identifying where your specific organisation sits against international best practice and what needs to change.
Commission Safeguarding ScreeningRequest a Safeguarding AuditGhana does not have a Sex Offenders Register. Schools, children's homes, hospitals and care facilities across the country hire staff every day without the single database that almost every comparable country considers fundamental to protecting children and vulnerable adults from harm.
The Register Ghana Does Not Have.
This is a brief about the silence in Ghana's child and vulnerable-adult protection architecture — and about what organisations can do, today, to close that gap while the national infrastructure is still being built. It draws on the working models of South Africa, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Nigeria. And it proposes a private-sector safeguarding standard that Ghana's responsible employers can implement now, without waiting for the law to catch up.
A Protection Register That Does Not Exist
In August 2020, the Domestic Violence and Victims Support Unit (DOVVSU) of the Ghana Police Service publicly announced that the country would establish a Sex Offenders Register — to serve as a national reference point for the protection of children and vulnerable adults. The announcement was welcomed. Years on, the register remains on the drawing board. No public database exists. No employer of teachers, caregivers, or domestic staff in Ghana can check a candidate's name against a national list of persons convicted of sexual offences against children or vulnerable adults, because that list does not exist in an accessible form.
This is not a technical detail. It is a structural gap in Ghana's safeguarding architecture that has consequences every day — in schools, children's homes, hospitals, places of worship, and private households where vulnerable people are cared for by adults whose history cannot be independently verified against the single record that matters most.
"We don't have one specifically for rape convicts, but we intend to do that going forward. It is on the drawing board, to establish a register for people who have been convicted of rape which among other things is to serve as a reference point."— Chief Superintendent Owusua Kyeremeh, National Coordinator, DOVVSU, August 2020
Average annual incidence rate of recorded child rape per 100,000 girls up to age 19 in Ghana, 2010–2014, according to the Domestic Violence and Victims Support Unit. Reported cases only. The actual rate is widely believed to be many times higher.
A Plan Ghana study conducted in Awutu Senya, Effutu and Upper Manya Krobo Districts found that approximately 14% of female students and 10% of male students reported having been sexually abused — by classmates, teachers, and relatives.
Among survivors in the Plan Ghana study who identified their abusers, 21% named teachers as among the perpetrators. Teachers sit alongside classmates, neighbours, and relatives as the adults children most commonly report having been abused by.
Statistics on sexual offences are notoriously under-reported everywhere in the world. In Ghana — where stigma, family pressure to withdraw complaints, long-delayed justice and limited institutional response frequently discourage reporting — the true scale is almost certainly a significant multiple of what is recorded. OSG cites only figures that have been independently documented by Ghana Police, DOVVSU, or peer-reviewed academic research. Where numbers are uncertain, we say so. The underlying reality is not uncertain: the gap between recorded cases and actual incidence is wide, and the recorded cases alone are more than sufficient to justify comprehensive safeguarding screening.
A Police Clearance Certificate Is
Not a Safeguarding Check.
Every school, children's home, hospital, rehabilitation centre, boarding house, Sunday school, and high-net-worth household in Ghana relies — at the point of hiring — on a Ghana Police Criminal Records Bureau clearance, a reference letter, and a CV. This is the safeguarding infrastructure. None of these instruments is designed to do what a Sex Offenders Register or a Barred List does. The gap between what these instruments provide and what safeguarding actually requires is the gap in which harm to vulnerable people is enabled.
Not Concerns, Referrals, or Barring.
A Ghana Police clearance certificate confirms whether the individual has a recorded criminal conviction. It does not capture: allegations that were investigated but not prosecuted; safeguarding referrals made by previous employers; disciplinary findings by professional bodies; dismissals for conduct concerns; or concerns raised by children, parents, or other staff that never reached the criminal justice system. In the UK system, most people barred from working with children were barred on the basis of non-conviction information — safeguarding referrals and disciplinary findings. That entire category of risk is invisible to a Ghana police clearance.
The pattern is documented across every jurisdiction that has studied institutional abuse. An individual dismissed from one school for conduct concerns — without a criminal conviction — simply applies for a post at the next school, where the concerns are invisible. Without a national register or barred list, nothing in the hiring process is designed to detect this pattern. In the United States, the Government Accountability Office documented 15 cases of individuals with histories of sexual misconduct who were hired or retained by public and private schools as teachers, administrators, and volunteers — specifically because the safeguarding information was not systematically captured and made accessible to employers.
Ghana hosts significant numbers of foreign nationals working in education, healthcare, religious institutions, development agencies, and private care. A Ghana police clearance captures convictions within Ghana. It does not capture convictions in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa, or any other jurisdiction. An individual barred from working with children in their country of origin can — unless specifically asked and their answer independently verified — secure a position in Ghana working with children, without the red flag ever surfacing.
Teaching qualifications, nursing licences, social work certifications, and childcare credentials are frequently fabricated or fraudulently obtained in Ghana — a pattern OSG has covered in prior briefs. The individual presenting themselves as a qualified teacher or caregiver may not only lack legitimate credentials but may have been struck off or disciplined under a different name or a prior credential. Without source verification and — where professional regulation exists — a direct check against the regulatory body, the person standing in front of a child or a vulnerable adult may be someone entirely different from the person the CV describes.
The absence of a Sex Offenders Register in Ghana is not a reason to lower the safeguarding standard. It is a reason to raise the rigour of the due diligence that employers in care settings apply — because the national safety net most countries rely on simply is not there to catch the person who slips through. The burden of protection falls on the employer, the school, the home, the hospital, the household — and on the professional firms they engage to do what the state is not yet equipped to do.
How Other Countries
Have Built This.
Ghana is not the first country to recognise that a fragmented approach to safeguarding puts children and vulnerable adults at risk. The countries below have each, over decades and in response to specific national incidents, built structured systems that either register sex offenders or actively bar unsuitable persons from working with vulnerable people. Each model has strengths and weaknesses. Together, they provide a clear picture of what the state-level infrastructure can look like — and what, in the interim, Ghanaian organisations can adapt into their own private-sector safeguarding practice.
South Africa's NRSO was established by an Act of Parliament in 2007 and expanded in 2021 to cover offences against all vulnerable persons, not only children and persons with mental disabilities. The register is a record of names of those found guilty of sexual offences against vulnerable persons — whether the offence was committed inside or outside South Africa. It creates a legal obligation on employers in both the public and private sector to check whether a person being hired is fit to work with vulnerable people.
As of early 2025, the register held 32,501 active offenders, with a further 10,325 under consideration for inclusion. Individuals listed on the NRSO are barred from employment giving access to vulnerable persons, and are prohibited from fostering or adopting children. The register is not currently open to the general public — a matter of active legislative debate in South Africa — but is accessible to employers under a controlled procedure. A parallel National Child Protection Register operates under the Children's Act of 2005 and maintains Part B: persons found by a court to be unsuitable to work with children.
The UK's Disclosure and Barring Service is arguably the most developed safeguarding vetting system in operation. It was formed in 2012 by merging the Criminal Records Bureau and the Independent Safeguarding Authority. The DBS does two things: it provides four tiers of criminal record disclosure, and it maintains two Barred Lists — the Children's Barred List and the Adults' Barred List. A person on either Barred List is legally prohibited from working in "regulated activity" with that group, and it is a criminal offence for an employer to knowingly employ a barred person in regulated activity.
The Enhanced DBS Check — required for teachers, healthcare staff, childcare workers, and anyone working with vulnerable groups — includes criminal conviction history, cautions, and non-conviction information held by relevant police forces that the Chief Police Officer considers should be disclosed. Employers, regulatory bodies, and volunteer managers have a legal duty to refer to DBS any safeguarding concern that meets the threshold, meaning the system captures concerns that never reach the criminal justice system.
Australia operates a state-based system of Working with Children Checks — a mandatory, portable, employee-held clearance that allows the holder to engage in child-related work. Each state maintains its own check (WWCC in New South Wales and Victoria, Blue Card in Queensland, Working with Vulnerable People Check in ACT) but the underlying principle is consistent: the individual, not the employer, holds the check; the check is rigorous and periodic; and the check is a legal precondition to child-related work.
A Working with Children Check assesses national criminal history, findings of professional misconduct, reportable conduct — including misconduct that did not result in a criminal conviction — and any disciplinary information held by professional regulators. The system includes continuous monitoring: if relevant new information emerges during the validity period of a check, the check can be revoked. Crucially, the individual carries their clearance across employers — reducing the friction of recruitment while maintaining the protective standard. This is a model particularly well-suited to jurisdictions with large informal or self-employed caregiving sectors.
Nigeria's Sex Offenders Database is operated by the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP) and was established to document reported, arraigned, and convicted sex offences as defined under the Violence Against Persons (Prohibition) Act 2015. The register is notable in the African context for being partially publicly accessible: data on those convicted is available directly on the NSOD website, while data on reported or arraigned but not yet convicted cases is available on a controlled-access basis.
The Nigerian model is particularly useful as a reference for Ghana because of the shared regional context, comparable legal tradition, and the practical design choice to make conviction data public while protecting non-conviction data through controlled access. The register also operates a parallel registry of service providers and NGOs that offer safeguarding services — a feature relevant to Ghana as the domestic safeguarding ecosystem develops. The Nigerian experience demonstrates that West African jurisdictions can operate functional sex offender registers; the absence of one in Ghana is not a regional inevitability.
Across every working model — South Africa, the UK, Australia, Nigeria, and numerous others — three features recur. First, the system captures non-conviction information: safeguarding concerns, disciplinary findings, and protective barrings that never reached the criminal courts. Second, there is a legal obligation on employers in regulated activity to check against the register or barred list before appointment. Third, there are periodic updates — the system does not treat a single clean check as a permanent clearance. Every feature addresses a specific failure mode that a simple criminal record check cannot address. And every feature is implementable, in some form, inside a private-sector safeguarding framework even before national legislation catches up.
The Sectors Where Ghana's
Safeguarding Silence Matters Most
In each of the following sectors, children or vulnerable adults are placed daily in the care of adults whose full safeguarding history cannot currently be verified in Ghana. Each of these sectors is a place where the responsible employer should be applying a standard of pre-appointment and periodic screening that compensates for the absence of national infrastructure.
Basic schools, junior and senior high schools, boarding houses, private international schools, tuition and extra-curricular providers, sports coaches, music and arts instructors, boarding-house masters and mistresses. Every adult with sustained access to children in an educational capacity. Ghana's Plan Ghana research identifies teachers as among the top-reported perpetrators of sexual abuse in school settings.
Residential care providers, orphanages, group homes, rehabilitation facilities for children, transitional homes. Children in residential care are among the most vulnerable in any society — separated from family networks, often traumatised before arrival, and dependent on institutional staff for basic protection. The screening standard for residential childcare personnel must be uncompromising.
Paediatric and maternity wards, mental health facilities, special-needs care providers, facilities serving elderly or cognitively impaired patients. Healthcare staff routinely have intimate access to vulnerable patients with limited capacity to report harm. The combination of physical access, psychological authority, and diminished capacity to report makes this a category requiring enhanced safeguarding rigour.
Churches, mosques, Sunday schools, youth fellowships, religious camps, choirs, religious boarding programmes. Institutional religious settings have historically been among the environments where safeguarding failures have produced some of the most serious documented cases of institutional abuse worldwide. Ghana's religious institutions are no exception to the pattern, and the safeguarding standard applied should not be either.
House-helps, nannies, drivers, security personnel, gardeners, tutors, and private caregivers working inside the homes of high-net-worth families in Accra, Kumasi, Takoradi, and the diaspora's Ghanaian bases. The private household is the least-regulated safeguarding environment of all — and often the one with the longest, most intimate, and most unsupervised access to children and vulnerable elders.
Football academies, martial arts instructors, dance teachers, music tutors, drama coaches, scouts and youth movement leaders, summer camp operators. Adult-child relationships built on mentorship, physical contact, and out-of-school authority. Globally, extracurricular settings have produced a disproportionate share of documented abuse cases — because the adult enjoys authority without the institutional scrutiny of a school.
Whose Protection This Brief
Is Actually About
The analytical case for comprehensive safeguarding screening is made throughout this brief in institutional and operational terms. But the institutions and operations exist for one purpose only: to protect specific categories of human beings whose vulnerability the rest of us are collectively responsible for addressing.
Every child in a Ghanaian classroom, hostel, boarding house, or after-school programme — who has no means of independently verifying that the adult in front of them is fit to be there.
Every child in an orphanage, a children's home, a rehabilitation centre, a foster arrangement — children already made vulnerable by circumstance, for whom institutional protection is the primary safety net.
Adults with intellectual or cognitive disabilities, elderly patients with dementia, psychiatric inpatients, and individuals under sedation or post-operative care — whose capacity to report harm is itself compromised.
The child in a household where domestic staff have sustained, unsupervised, intimate access — where the employer's due diligence is often the only line of protection, and where the consequence of its absence is measured in a child's life.
"Vulnerable children and adults in Ghana are protected today by the goodwill of responsible employers, the diligence of individual caregivers, and the presence of family members watching. They are not protected by a system. Until they are, the responsible employer must become the system."— OSG Intelligence Brief 12
What OSG Offers in the Absence
of a National Register
OSG has designed a comprehensive safeguarding assessment framework specifically calibrated for the Ghanaian context — for employers in education, care, healthcare, religious institutions, domestic households, and youth programmes who cannot wait for national infrastructure to close the gap. The framework incorporates the operational lessons of the South African NRSO, the UK DBS, the Australian WWCC, and the Nigerian NSOD, adapted for the specific instruments and records available in Ghana today.
Beyond the standard Ghana Police clearance, OSG conducts enhanced inquiry with the Domestic Violence and Victims Support Unit (where legal consent permits), with the Ghana Education Service for teacher disciplinary records, with the Nurses and Midwifery Council of Ghana and the Medical and Dental Council for health professional conduct records, and with the Department of Social Welfare where foster or childcare licensing exists. Where the candidate has lived or worked abroad, OSG conducts parallel inquiry with equivalent bodies in those jurisdictions.
OSG contacts each previous employer directly, with specific focus on the safeguarding-relevant questions that reference letters rarely address: was the candidate ever the subject of a safeguarding concern or complaint? was the candidate ever asked to leave a post on conduct grounds, even if the departure was framed as voluntary? was the candidate ever moved away from direct access to children or vulnerable adults while employed? The answers surface patterns that a conventional reference check will not detect.
Teaching qualifications verified with the Ghana Education Service and the relevant colleges of education at source, not against copies supplied by the candidate. Nursing and allied health qualifications verified directly with the Nurses and Midwifery Council. Social work qualifications verified with the relevant regulatory body. Foreign qualifications verified at source with the originating institution — not merely authenticated by a stamp on a photocopy.
For roles with sustained direct access to children or vulnerable adults, OSG's psychological fitness assessment applies internationally validated instruments — including integrity psychometrics and clinical suitability assessment — to identify personality configurations and risk indicators associated with safeguarding failure. This is the same category of assessment that leading international safeguarding systems apply to the most sensitive care-giving roles.
Comprehensive adverse media review across Ghanaian, regional, and international sources — picking up press reports of disciplinary actions, investigations, or concerns that may never have resulted in formal conviction. Digital footprint analysis. And — within the bounds of legal consent and Ghana's Data Protection Act — discreet community-level enquiry in the candidate's home and professional community to surface the concerns that paper records often do not capture.
A single pre-appointment screen is not sufficient. OSG offers an annual re-screening programme for safeguarding-critical roles — matching the international standard, in which the adult who was cleared last year is re-verified this year, because circumstances change and new information emerges. Client employers receive a confidential safeguarding status report that allows them to meet their own governance and reputational obligations.
When assembled into an integrated safeguarding screening package, the OSG framework produces — in the Ghanaian context — an approximation of what a DBS Enhanced Check with Barred List verification delivers in the United Kingdom, or what a working WWCC clearance delivers in Australia. It is not a substitute for national infrastructure, and OSG publicly supports the establishment of a Ghana Sex Offenders Register as a matter of national priority. But in the meantime, it is the closest equivalent available to employers who are not willing to wait, and whose duty to the children and vulnerable adults in their care does not permit them to wait.
The Standard Ghana's Schools,
Care Facilities and Households Can Adopt Now
This brief is addressed to decision-makers: heads of schools, directors of children's homes, managing directors of hospitals, chairpersons of religious organisations, heads of household, and the boards that oversee them. The actions below are within the reach of any responsible employer, and do not require a change in national legislation to implement.
For Schools & Educational Institutions
Adopt a written safeguarding policy that applies to every appointment with access to students — teachers, boarders' masters, drivers, cleaners, security, external coaches. Require enhanced screening beyond police clearance for all appointments, calibrated to the specific safeguarding risk of the role. Implement annual re-screening for permanent staff. Maintain an internal safeguarding log. Train all staff on recognising and reporting safeguarding concerns. Require the same standard from external contractors.
For Children's Homes & Residential Care
Apply the highest level of safeguarding screening to every member of staff, resident volunteer, trustee, and regular visitor. Implement psychological fitness assessment for all care-giving roles. Maintain an independent safeguarding officer with direct reporting to the Board. Conduct quarterly reviews of the safeguarding log. Treat a single substantiated concern as a mandatory cause for dismissal, not a reputational problem to be contained.
For Hospitals & Healthcare Facilities
Require credential verification at source with the Nurses and Midwifery Council, the Medical and Dental Council, and equivalent foreign bodies for every clinical appointment. Apply enhanced safeguarding screening to staff working in paediatrics, maternity, mental health, geriatric care, and disability services. Maintain a named safeguarding lead within the facility. Implement mandatory safeguarding training for all staff — clinical and non-clinical alike.
For High-Net-Worth Households
Apply professional safeguarding screening to every member of domestic staff who will have direct or unsupervised access to children, elderly, or cognitively impaired family members. This is the single most important due diligence step a family can take, and the one most often skipped. OSG's Domestic Staff Screening package is designed precisely for this purpose and operates under strict confidentiality and Ghana Data Protection Act compliance.
Comprehensive safeguarding screening in Ghana — including enhanced regulatory inquiry, safeguarding-specific reference checks, credential source verification, psychological assessment, and adverse media review — costs between GHS 1,800 and GHS 4,500 per candidate depending on role and risk profile. This is not a trivial sum. It is, however, materially less than the cost of a single safeguarding incident — measured in harm to the child or vulnerable adult, in legal exposure to the institution, and in the reputational destruction that follows even one substantiated case. The cost of not screening is not a saving.
The Responsibility Is
Not Optional.
A national Sex Offenders Register for Ghana is a worthy goal, and OSG supports every serious effort to establish one. But that advocacy cannot become an excuse for inaction at the institutional level. Every day that responsible employers continue to hire for safeguarding-critical roles using only a police clearance certificate is a day on which Ghana's children and vulnerable adults are less protected than they would be under almost any comparable national framework.
The gap cannot be closed tomorrow by the state. It can be closed today, one employer at a time, by the institutions and households that understand what is at stake — and that refuse to outsource a duty they cannot delegate.
"The absence of a national register is not the end of the safeguarding argument. It is the beginning of the responsible employer's duty to build the protection that the state has not yet built."— OSG Intelligence Brief 12
Build Your Safeguarding Standard
Before You Need It.
Commission OSG's Safeguarding Screening for your school, care facility, hospital, or household. Or request a confidential Safeguarding Audit of your current hiring and monitoring practice — identifying where your specific organisation sits against international best practice and what needs to change.
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