Water and what to drink in Ghana

Sachet water: the drink the country runs on

The default drinking water in Ghana is sachet water, sold in a sealed 500 ml plastic bag, produced by licensed factories and regulated by the Food and Drugs Authority. Ghanaians call it pure water, and you will hear it sung out by hawkers at every junction and lorry park in the country.

You drink it by biting a corner off the bag and either sipping from the tear or emptying it into a bottle. That first attempt is comic; the bag is slippery, the tear is too big, and you wear some of it. After a day you will do it without thinking.

The water inside a properly produced sachet is treated and safe. The outside of the bag is a different matter entirely, because that bag has been in a bowl of melting ice, in a crate, on a head, in a cooler and in several hands. Wipe the corner before you bite it. Most Ghanaians do exactly this, quickly and without comment.

Two things to check. There should be a printed brand name, a producer address and a batch or expiry mark on the bag, not just blank film. And it should be genuinely sealed, with no leak when you squeeze it. Unbranded sachets with no printing exist and are not worth the saving.

The obvious drawback is plastic. Sachets are the cheapest way for tens of millions of people to get clean water, and they are also the reason plastic film blocks gutters in every town in the country. That tension is real and there is no comfortable answer to it.

Bottled water and where to buy it

Bottled water is the simplest choice for a visitor and it is available everywhere, from supermarkets and filling stations to boys walking between cars at a traffic light. Established brands such as Voltic and Verna are sold nationwide, and any supermarket will stock several others.

Buy in volume rather than by the bottle. A supermarket in Accra, Kumasi or Takoradi will sell you a shrink-wrapped pack or a five-litre container for a fraction of what the same water costs bottle by bottle at a hotel minibar, and having a big container in the room means you refill a reusable bottle each morning instead of buying small ones all day.

When buying from a street vendor or a small shop, glance at the seal. An intact cap ring matters. Refilled bottles are uncommon but not unheard of, and the check costs you a second.

Cold is the other variable. Water sold from a cooler of ice is cold; water sold from a shelf in a shop with no power is not. In the heat you will find yourself planning around this, and the moment you realise you are pleased about a cold bottle of water is roughly the moment you have acclimatised to Ghana.

For a longer stay, a decent filter bottle or a UV steriliser bottle changes the arithmetic. You can then fill from a tap you have reason to trust and cut your plastic use sharply, which matters more here than in most places.

Can you drink the tap water?

Do not drink tap water in Ghana untreated, even though the water leaving the treatment works is chlorinated and genuinely treated. The problem is what happens between the plant and your glass.

Ghana Water Limited treats and supplies mains water to the cities. Much of the distribution network, particularly in older parts of Accra, Kumasi and Sekondi-Takoradi, is elderly. Pipes leak, pressure drops, and when pressure drops, groundwater can enter through the same cracks that were letting water out. That is the real mechanism of contamination and it is invisible at the tap.

The second stage is the building itself. Almost every property stores water in a ground tank and a rooftop polytank, and the condition of those tanks is entirely down to the landlord. A well-kept tank is cleaned periodically and covered properly. A neglected one has not been opened in years.

What Ghanaians actually do varies by household. Plenty of people drink filtered tap water at home from a countertop filter or a boiled kettle, and plenty of others buy sachets exclusively. Almost nobody drinks straight from an unfiltered tap in a city.

For brushing teeth, tap water is fine for most people and this is where visitors tend to overthink. If you have a delicate stomach or are travelling with small children, use bottled water for teeth as well for the first week. It is a small cost for one less thing to wonder about.

How water actually reaches a Ghanaian house

Understanding household plumbing here explains most of the odd things you will notice, and the short version is that water does not arrive on demand from a pressurised main — it is collected, stored and pumped.

The usual chain runs like this. Mains water arrives from Ghana Water Limited, often intermittently and sometimes at night, or a borehole on the property is pumped up instead. It fills an underground or ground-level storage tank. An electric pump lifts it from there to a black polytank on the roof. Gravity from that rooftop tank is what gives you a shower.

Two things can therefore interrupt your water without anything being wrong with the building. If the mains has not delivered for a few days and the ground tank is low, somebody orders a tanker to refill it, which is entirely routine. And if the electricity fails, the pump stops, so a power cut becomes a water cut as soon as the roof tank empties.

This is why every Ghanaian bathroom has a bucket, and why finding one in your accommodation is not a comment on the standard of the place. A bucket bath with a small jug works perfectly well, and a bucket of water flushes a toilet exactly as the cistern would.

In the dry season and towards the end of the harmattan the pressure on supply rises, and some districts of Accra go longer between mains deliveries. Hotels and well-run homes absorb this invisibly through large storage. Cheaper places do not.

Ice, cold drinks and what to decline

Ice in hotels, established restaurants and any place with a proper kitchen is almost always made from treated water and is fine. Ice from a street bar, a small chop bar or a cooler box of unknown origin is a question mark, and the polite thing is simply to take your drink without it.

The reason is not that anyone is careless. It is that ice in the informal trade is often bought in blocks, broken up with whatever is to hand, and stored in a container that was last washed with tap water. None of the individual steps is alarming and the cumulative uncertainty is enough to skip.

Bottled soft drinks and beer are safe everywhere, because they arrive sealed. Ghana produces its own beers and a full range of soft drinks, and every roadside seller will have them in a chest cooler. The rule of thumb applies without effort: if it came out of a sealed container in front of you, it is fine.

Fresh coconuts are one of the genuine pleasures here, and they are safe by construction. A seller with a stack of green coconuts and a cutlass will take the top off one in three strokes and hand it to you, and when you have drunk it he will split it so you can scoop the jelly out with a piece of the husk. Nothing has touched the inside but the blade.

Fresh juices and smoothies sit in the middle. In a café that runs a clean kitchen, no problem. From a blender on a street corner with water added, less certain, and the added water is the variable rather than the fruit.

The local drinks worth trying

Ghana has a proper repertoire of non-alcoholic drinks that are worth ordering for their own sake, and most of them are safe when bought somewhere with a kitchen rather than from an open bucket.

Sobolo is the one to start with. Dried hibiscus calyces steeped with ginger, pineapple skin, cloves and sometimes a little chilli, served cold and deep red. It is sharp, faintly spicy and enormously refreshing in the heat. Restaurants bottle their own; roadside sellers make it at home.

Asana is a fermented roasted-corn drink, tan coloured and slightly sour. Brukina, more common in the north and among Hausa communities, mixes fermented milk with millet grains and comes out lumpy in a way that puts some people off and hooks others. Lamugin is a ginger and spice drink sold cold in sachets.

On the alcoholic side, palm wine is tapped fresh from felled palms and drunk the same day, sweet in the morning and increasingly sour by evening as it ferments in the pot. Akpeteshie is the distilled version, strong and unsubtle, and often served as a small measure with ceremony rather than as a drink you sit with. Pito, a millet beer served from a calabash, belongs to the north.

The sensible rule for the fermented and home-made drinks is the same one that applies to food: eat and drink where there is turnover. A seller whose pot empties by lunchtime has a fresher product than one whose pot has been standing in the sun since dawn. The same logic runs through our guide to Ghanaian food.

What actually makes travellers ill here

Most upset stomachs on a Ghana trip are not caused by drinking water at all. They come from a sharp change of diet, more chilli than your system is used to, food that has sat too long in the heat, and hands that went from a shared bowl to a mouth without soap in between.

Ghanaian food is heavy on palm oil, groundnut paste, chilli and starch. That is a substantial shift for a stomach used to something blander, and the first few days can be uncomfortable for reasons that have nothing to do with hygiene. Easing in rather than eating three heavy bowls of light soup on day one is sensible.

Hand washing is the genuinely high-value habit. Ghanaian eating culture includes it — a bowl and kettle come to the table, and people wash before touching food — and carrying a small bottle of sanitiser for the times when there is no bowl covers the gap. Food is often eaten with the right hand, and that convention makes clean hands non-negotiable.

Turnover beats appearance when judging a food seller. A busy waakye stall that sells out by eleven is a better bet than a quiet restaurant with tablecloths and a slow kitchen. Food cooked to order in front of you is better than food kept warm.

Serious waterborne illness — typhoid, cholera, hepatitis A — exists in Ghana and is worth a conversation with a travel clinic before you fly. That conversation belongs with a doctor, and our piece on health and malaria in Ghana covers what to raise at that appointment. Malaria, not water, is the health issue that should have most of your attention.

Staying hydrated in Ghanaian heat

You will need considerably more water here than at home, and most visitors underestimate it for the first three or four days. Ghana sits a few degrees north of the equator, humidity on the coast is high for much of the year, and you lose fluid steadily even sitting still in the shade.

The signs of falling behind are familiar but easy to misread on a trip: a dull headache in the afternoon, tiredness that feels like jet lag long after jet lag should have passed, dark urine, irritability on a day that should be enjoyable. People blame the flight. It is usually the water.

Build a routine instead of reacting. A bottle by the bed, refilled at night. One with you in the vehicle every day. A habit of drinking a full sachet or bottle when you arrive anywhere, before you do anything else. Alcohol and the heat are a poor combination in the middle of the day, and the beer that would be pleasant at home at noon is not pleasant here at noon.

Carry oral rehydration salts. They weigh nothing, they are sold in every pharmacy in Ghana, and a sachet dissolved in clean water does more for a bad afternoon than any amount of plain water. If you do get a stomach upset, the fluid loss is the thing that actually flattens you, and rehydration is the treatment that matters first.

The inland north is hotter and drier than the coast, and the harmattan months from roughly December to February add a dry dusty wind that dehydrates you faster than the temperature suggests. Drink more on a Mole or Bolgatanga leg than you would in Accra.

Water at restaurants, chop bars and on the road

Ordering water in Ghana gets you a sealed bottle by default, and in a chop bar it may well get you a sachet, which is entirely normal and not a lesser product. Nobody will bring you a jug of tap water, and asking for one will produce confusion rather than offence.

In a chop bar — the small, plain, excellent local restaurants where most Ghanaians actually eat — the sequence is usually that you sit, you are told what is available today rather than handed a menu, and water arrives in a bowl for your hands before it arrives in a bag for your throat. Take both.

On the road, the junction towns are where you stock up. Any long drive out of Accra passes through a town where sellers come to the car window with water, bread, plantain chips, oranges peeled and scored, and boiled eggs. Buying two or three sachets at a stop like this is the normal rhythm of a Ghanaian road trip and costs very little.

Keep a reusable bottle in the vehicle and decant into it. Sachets are awkward to carry once opened and impossible to reseal, so people either finish them immediately or lose half. A bottle you can cap solves a problem you will otherwise have four times a day.

For long drives specifically, a cool box in the boot with ice and bottles transforms an afternoon. Any driver who does this route regularly will already have one, and if yours does not, it is worth asking.

What to bring for water and what to buy here

Bring three things and buy the rest in Ghana: a sturdy reusable bottle, oral rehydration salts, and a filter or steriliser bottle if you are staying more than a couple of weeks. Everything else is available locally and cheaper here.

The reusable bottle should be insulated if you have one, because a cold drink stays cold for a few hours rather than a few minutes, and that matters more than it sounds. A wide mouth is easier to fill from a five-litre container.

Rehydration salts are sold in any Ghanaian pharmacy, so bringing them is about having them at three in the morning on day two rather than about availability. Pharmacies here are generally good, well stocked and staffed by people who will give you sensible advice on minor complaints.

Do not bother bringing bottled water, water purification tablets for city travel, or a heavy gravity filter unless you are camping. Treated water is genuinely everywhere in Ghana, including in small towns, and you will not find yourself stuck for a drink.

Two habits worth packing along with the kit. Wipe the sachet before you bite it, and keep hand sanitiser within reach rather than in the bottom of a bag. Our Ghana packing list sets this out alongside the rest of the kit, and the broader Ghana travel guide covers how these practicalities fit into planning a trip.

Children, long stays and settling in

For children and for anyone staying several months, the sensible approach is a household water system rather than a stream of purchased bottles, and that is how most resident families here operate.

The common arrangements are a countertop or under-sink filter, a dispenser fed by large returnable bottles delivered to the house, or boiling and storing in the fridge. Dispensers with 18-litre returnable bottles are widely available in the cities and are what many expatriate and Ghanaian households use, because the delivery arrives, the empties go back, and nobody thinks about it again.

With young children, the first fortnight deserves more caution than you would apply to yourself: bottled or filtered water for drinking and teeth, no street ice, no unpasteurised fermented drinks, and rehydration salts kept in the bathroom cupboard rather than the suitcase. Children dehydrate faster than adults in this heat and they do not always say so.

Over a long stay you will find your own line, and it will end up somewhere close to where your Ghanaian neighbours have theirs. Most people relax about ice in known places, stay strict about untreated tap water, and stop thinking about it altogether.

One practical point for anyone renting: ask when the polytank was last cleaned and whether there is a borehole or only mains supply. A house with a borehole and a large ground tank rarely runs dry. A house depending entirely on intermittent mains will, at some point, need a tanker.

How we sort water out for our guests

Water is one of the quiet details that decides whether a trip feels easy, so we handle it rather than leaving it to you. The furnished homes we run in Kasoa Opeikuma have proper storage and hot water, our drivers keep water in the vehicle on long routes, and we will tell you which stops on a route have a clean kitchen and which do not.

You can see how the houses are set up on our stays page. Quotes come from one named trip manager and are itemised, so you see what is included.

Questions people ask