Before the interchange, Pokuase junction was where journeys to and from Kumasi went to die. Trucks, trotros and private cars met in a single, chaotic crossing on the Accra-Nsawam road. In July 2021, President Nana Akufo-Addo commissioned a four-tier interchange at the junction, the first of its kind in Ghana.
The junction
Pokuase sits on the northern edge of Greater Accra, on the Accra-Kumasi highway near Amasaman. Roads from Awoshie and from the western suburbs meet the highway there. As Accra grew north, traffic at the junction became one of the worst bottlenecks in the region.
From three tiers to four
The original design was a three-tier interchange. After a value engineering review, the contractor, Zhongmei Engineering Group of China, proposed a four-tier stack, and the Ministry of Roads and Highways approved the change. The result is a structure where four levels of road cross each other.
The cost
The project was funded with a concessional loan from the African Development Bank of about $84 million, according to official reports. Other reports gave a higher total for the project. Construction took about three years.
Phase one
Akufo-Addo opened the first phase on 25 November 2020, during a tour of the Greater Accra Region. Tier three, carrying traffic between Awoshie and Accra and from Kumasi to Awoshie, opened to traffic.
Full commissioning
The full interchange was commissioned in July 2021. The government presented it as a symbol of road modernisation and pointed to the shorter travel times it brought.
What changed
Drivers heading to Kumasi from Accra now pass through Pokuase without the long waits that used to be normal. Local traffic between communities on either side of the highway also moves more easily.
Complaints
Like other big interchanges, Pokuase has faced complaints from pedestrians who find it hard to cross and from traders who lost their places near the old junction. Drainage around the structure has also been raised during heavy rain.
Part of a larger corridor
Pokuase sits on the Accra-Kumasi highway, Ghana’s busiest long-distance road and the main route between the capital and the Ashanti Region. Traffic on the corridor includes cargo trucks heading north from Tema port, intercity buses and commuters from fast-growing suburbs such as Amasaman, Medie and Nsawam. Improving one junction moves the bottleneck to the next one, and drivers report that queues now build further along the road at peak times. Transport planners have argued for dualisation and further interchanges along the whole stretch, so that Pokuase becomes part of a continuous fast road rather than a single showpiece.
Ghana’s road politics often turn on who cut the sod and who commissioned the project. At Pokuase, the result is a stack of roads that has changed one of Accra’s most hated junctions into one that most drivers barely notice.
