By Group Manko · Accra · August 2026 · All insights
Two kinds of feasibility study
Every feasibility study looks similar from the outside: a bound document with sections, charts and a conclusion. From the inside, they divide cleanly into two kinds. One is written to be filed — it supports a decision already made, cites whatever data was easiest to find, and hedges its conclusion into uselessness. The other is written to be acted on: it exists to stop a bad commitment or sharpen a good one, and every section carries weight.
In Ghana and across West Africa, the gap between the two is wider than in data-rich markets — because here, the numbers that decide a project’s fate mostly cannot be downloaded. They have to be gathered.
The seven components
A study you can put capital behind contains, at minimum:
- Demand evidence. Who buys, at what price, how often — established from primary work: interviews, site counts, transaction observation, competitor tenancy. Not extrapolations from national statistics.
- Site and location analysis. Access, services, catchment, surroundings, and the trajectory of the corridor the site sits in — walked, not mapped.
- Highest-and-best-use assessment. The honest comparison of what the asset could be, not a justification of what the sponsor already wants it to be.
- Competitive and pricing research. What the alternatives charge, deliver and fail at — on the ground today, not in last year’s report.
- Counterparty due diligence. The people and entities the project depends on: their history, their interests, their capacity to deliver.
- Risk profile with named unknowns. What could break the thesis, how likely, how mitigable — and, critically, what the study could not establish.
- A recommendation someone signs. Proceed, proceed-with-conditions, or decline — with the conditions specified. A study that ends without a position is marketing.
Why ground truth matters more here
Public data in West Africa is thin, lagged and fragmented, and a substantial share of economic life is informal. This is not a reason to avoid the market — it is the reason research done properly creates real advantage. When demand evidence is gathered at the site, from the buyers, in the corridor, you know something the desk-bound competitor does not. Land questions raise the stakes further: title verification and community due diligence are not appendices in Ghana; they are survival requirements, and they belong inside the feasibility scope, not after it.
Red flags of a weak study
You can usually identify a report-for-the-shelf in ten minutes. National GDP statistics standing in for local demand. No named sources or fieldwork dates. Pricing tables with no methodology. Risk sections that list only generic country risk. No statement of what remains unknown. And above all: a conclusion that recommends proceeding regardless of what the body of the document found.
One more tell, specific to our region: a study on land or property that does not address title status and community context is not a feasibility study. It is a brochure.
How to commission well
Start from the decision, not the document: what commitment is this study protecting? Agree the scope in those terms, ask who will do the fieldwork and when, and require confidence levels on findings. Expect weeks, not days — rigor takes time. And insist on the recommendation being explicit; you are paying for a position, not a summary.
How Group Manko approaches it
Our market intelligence and feasibility practice produces research to the standard we stake our own commitments on — the same validation discipline that underpins our development and origination work, including our Eastern Ghana flagship. Sources disclosed, confidence stated, unknowns named. If that is the standard your decision needs, we should talk.