GhanaWeb is Ghana’s leading digital news and online advertising portal that is democratizing journalism, promoting freedom of expression and empowering content creators.
The open platform launched in 1999 operates under the laws of the Netherlands, a legal setup that allows Ghanaians to express themselves freely through opinion articles, multimedia content and comments.
The platform also hosts millions of user-generated content published through the GhanaWeb Reporter which is a digital media sharing platform integrated into the GhanaWeb App to give citizen journalists and content creators direct access to publish a wide range of local content.
According to the Alexa website traffic statistics, GhanaWeb is very popular among Ghanaian migrants in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, Italy, South Africa, Netherlands, France and many other countries.
These loyal visitors and the millions of readers in Ghana have made GhanaWeb the most popular news website in Ghana and ranked the third most visited website in the country after Google and YouTube.
GhanaWeb is updated with original content out of Accra by a team of editors and journalists who work around the clock to ensure balanced and unbiased coverage of the news.
The privately-owned independent and objective portal has a team of web developers and designers who regularly improve the technology and design of the platform which has been built to be fast and efficient for its 4 million unique visitors each month.
GhanaWeb is part of the AfricaWeb Holding group, a digital solutions provider for African publishers. AfricaWeb also owns CamerounWeb.com and MyNigeria.com among other country-specific portals as part of its goal of developing viable independent news portals as well as advertising and publishing solutions for Africa.
GhanaWeb’s Editorial Team adheres to the Editorial Standards and Policies of the AfricaWeb Group. AfricaWeb Publishing manages and licenses all content within the group and deals with all copyright issues on behalf of the group. Check out our Contact Page to get in touch with GhanaWeb editors or with AfricaWeb Publishing.
GhanaWeb.com is rich in history that spans over two decades since its conception in 1994 as a print magazine serving the growing Ghanaian community in Amsterdam by collating news stories from Ghanaian newspapers.
The website was launched on January 1, 1999, as an amalgamation with GhanaHomePage - a blog on the domain of the University of Uta in Finland - which was conceived in the early nineties by a Ghanaian lecturer working in Finland.
GhanaWeb.com/GhanaHomePage featured links to the latest news, sports, announcements, chat rooms, Ghanaian dictionary and many other resources. News stories from Ghana were published from different sources and mailing lists from magazines.
On October 13, 1999, the website experienced a major update with a colourful interface designed by a Russian graphical top designer, setting a new standard in Ghana for ease of navigation to the comprehensive resource uploaded on the portal. Since then, the colour interface has become a trademark for GhanaWeb breaking away from the global trend of publishing content on dull and uninspiring websites.
Quite uniquely for the early years of the World Wide Web, GhanaWeb used a custom-built CMS (Content Management System), initially developed by the Dutch founder - a professional software engineer - which was specifically engineered for the African infrastructure conditions. Through the custom CMS, GhanaWeb has been loading very fast and reliable even on slow and unreliable African internet connections.
In 2001, GhanaWeb was the first African website offering a mobile website which was initially supporting feature phones such as the iconic Nokia 3110. Through this Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) site, GhanaWeb went mobile 6 years before the first iPhone hit the market.
The portal grew steadily with many people helping to update the website with daily news and information from Ghana. Notable journalists, bloggers and many columnists have gained popularity through their work and opinions on GhanaWeb.
By 2009, advertising revenues had improved drastically compared to the seven past years and more people were engaged remotely to update the website with news and information as it continued to lead the online news space in Ghana since its inception.
From 2011 onward, GhanaWeb launched a series of partnerships with local companies to run the editorial section of the business from Ghana while maintaining the legal entity as well as technical operations in Amsterdam to protect the rights of Ghanaians to express their opinions freely without government interference.
The GhanaWeb Newsroom has since grown into a strong backbone of the business despite its fair share of lawsuits in Europe based on stories published on the website. The setbacks haven’t changed GhanaWeb’s stance on maintaining independence and offering Ghanaians an objective and balanced news media platform that’s devoid of censorship.
2014 was the right time for the business to expand and it did with CameroonWeb.com. The portal was built on the same tenets of GhanaWeb with an element of bilingualism. CameroonWeb was published in both French and English when it was launched and journalists recruited in Cameroon managed the portal.
After two years, the market clearly swayed towards the French section of the website hence the need to collapse the English section to create the solely French CamerounWeb.com portal.
The portal has grown to become the most popular Cameroonian website ranked seventh after top sites like Google, YouTube etc. despite the Cameroonian government’s censorship and heavy attacks on the media. Its newsroom has been moved from the country to protect the journalists.
The expansion success of GhanaWeb necessitated the founding of AfricaWeb Holding which was incorporated in 2019 as AfricaWeb Publishing B.V. in the Netherlands.
It was created to help develop viable independent news portals, and web and publishing solutions in Africa. Under its wings is MyNigeria.com which was launched in October 2019 to serve the Nigerian population.
AfricaWeb Holding is building successful partnerships to help make the dream of creating robust online media in Africa a possibility. In 2021, the AW Free Foundation, which is an independent non-profit organisation, was founded by AfricaWeb to promote professional journalism, independent media and freedom of expression in Sub-Saharan Africa.
With operations in Ghana, Cameroon, Nigeria and Togo among others, the foundation uses technology, innovation and skills to support media under threat, and promote open technology and uncensored media tools and toolkits for journalists.
GhanaWeb has currently evolved from being a news aggregator website to becoming a producer of original content including video and digital content. It also has a mobile app that hosts the GhanaWeb Reporter which is a digital media sharing platform that gives citizen journalists and content creators direct access to publish a wide range of local content.
In 2020, GhanaWeb won the first Google News Initiative (GNI) Innovation Challenge for its novel GhanaWeb Reporter project which will inject new ideas into the global news ecosystem.
The GhanaWeb Reporter is among 21 projects from 13 countries in the Middle East, Turkey and Africa region to receive $1.93 million in funding to help journalism thrive in the digital age.
In the next five years, the media portals under the AfricaWeb Holding umbrella are expected to employ over 300 workers and reach 20 million unique visitors in a month. Indeed, the dream started with placing Ghana on the web, now it is Africa’s turn.
GhanaWeb is also active on LinkedIn, FaceBook, Twitter, YouTube, Google News, Wikipedia, Wikidata, and many other places in the digital world.
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