Ghana welcomes African Americans who decide to leave the U.S.

Ghana has decided to welcome with open arms the African Americans who decide to leave the United States and return to Africa.

The Ghanaian government is negotiating an agreement with the local authorities to make available more than 200 hectares of building land for the African Diaspora who decide to go there.

There is space to accommodate about 1,500 families. It is one of the measures decided by the government to follow up the initiative called “Year of Return “,which attracted thousands of African-American tourists to Ghana in 2019, four hundred years after the departure of the first slave ships from the Gold Coast bound for the Americas.

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The government's plan offers tourists the possibility to convert their tourist visa into a residential one, with a path that accompanies people to expatriate, obtain citizenship, special permits for the land where they will build their houses and eventually become Ghanaian citizens. 

"We tell our African-American brothers that there is a place where they can escape from racism. And this place is Africa," said Ghana Tourism Authority CEO Akwasi Agyeman interviewed by Danielle Paquette, West Africa correspondent for the Washington Post.

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The number of tourists who visited Ghana last year rose by 45%: 237,000 people in the first nine months of 2019 according to data from the Ghana Tourism Authority. The majority come from the United States. 

Now the government is trying to increase these flows. As with European pensioners who choose to live in Portugal to pay less tax, the government has just launched a ten-year programme called 'Beyond the Return' to attract people and transfer their professional skills and assets to Ghana, in a general context that favours foreign investment and new economic activities.

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