What if Ghana’s next tourism boom begins with Ghanaians?

As Do Ghana and Joy FM invite Ghanaians to “Go Outside. Find Your Centre”, a growing appetite for outdoor experiences is opening a bigger question about the future of domestic tourism, and why the country’s biggest tourism market may be the one already living here. Is doing Ghana the new weekend escape?

On World Tourism Day this Sunday, BENTSIFI, in collaboration with Joy FM and Joy Prime, takes another step in a journey that began long before domestic tourism became the fashionable phrase it is today. They have a simple invitation: GO OUTSIDE. It is an invitation that may sound remarkably contemporary, even though the instinct behind it is anything but new.

Ghanaians have always had a relationship with the outdoors. There was a time when weekends were naturally spent at the beach, the 1980s phenomenon of ‘Meet Me There’, by Lake Volta in the Akosombo area, at the botanical garden at Aburi, at a swimming pool, on a football field or simply somewhere outside the city. Families packed food for picnics, friends organised outings, schools took children on excursions, and public holidays offered an excuse to get into a car or onto a bus and see somewhere different.

Nobody needed to call it an ‘outdoor experience’. It was simply how people spent their leisure. The modern urban weekend has become increasingly indoor, commercial and digitally mediated, with shopping malls, restaurants, clubs and other forms of organised entertainment competing for people’s leisure time.

International travel has also become more visible and aspirational, while social media has transformed the way destinations are discovered and presented. Yet, interestingly, outdoor recreation is finding a new audience. Hiking, cycling, camping, farm visits, run clubs, wellness retreats and destination picnics are becoming increasingly popular, particularly among younger urban audiences.

What looks like a new movement may therefore be less a new invention than a return to an old instinct, updated for a different generation. It is against this changing leisure landscape that PaJohn Dadson poses a deceptively simple question: What would happen if we all did a little more Ghana? For decades, much of Ghana’s tourism conversation has looked outward.