The Sultan Ahmed Mosque
The design follows Istanbul's seventeenth-century Blue Mosque: a central dome over a square prayer hall, cascading half-domes, and slender pencil minarets.
Ghana-Net.com · Accra · Kawukudi / Kanda · Faith & Landmarks
Drive along the Ring Road or come in to land at Accra International Airport and you will see them: four pencil-thin minarets, 65 metres tall, around a great grey dome, as if a piece of Istanbul had been dropped between the compound houses of Kanda and Nima. The Ghana National Mosque is a copy, in miniature, of the Blue Mosque, built by a Turkish foundation and opened in 2021. It is the biggest mosque in the country, a gift, a statement of Turkish diplomacy, and the answer to a grievance that went back to the 1990s, when Accra's old central mosque was knocked down for a park.
The story starts not with the Turks but with a demolition. In central Accra a mosque was pulled down to make room for Rawlings Park, and for Accra's Muslims the loss rankled. In 1995 President Jerry John Rawlings handed a large plot at Kawukudi, in the Kanda area north of the city centre, to the National Chief Imam, Sheikh Osmanu Nuhu Sharubutu, as a replacement site for a national mosque.
For years the land lay mostly empty. Ghana's Muslim community, roughly a fifth of the population, had no money on the scale needed for a true national mosque, and the state was not going to pay for one.
The money came from Turkey. The Hudai Foundation (Human Development International), a Turkish charity backed by businessmen, took on the project with the support of the Turkish government and its Presidency of Religious Affairs, working with the National Chief Imam and a Ghana–Turkey friendship association. Construction began in 2012 and took about eight years.
On 16 July 2021 President Nana Akufo-Addo commissioned the complex, thanking Turkey and telling Muslim leaders that a mosque should bring people together, not divide them. The cost was reported as about US$10 million; some reports gave a higher figure for the whole complex.
The design follows Istanbul's seventeenth-century Blue Mosque: a central dome over a square prayer hall, cascading half-domes, and slender pencil minarets.
Visible across much of Accra, and among the tallest structures in the northern part of the city.
Room for about 15,000 worshippers; described at opening as the second-largest mosque in West Africa.
White marble, Turkish-style painted domes, calligraphy and coloured windows, all in the Ottoman revival manner.
A contrast worth seeing: Ghana's oldest mosques look nothing like this. The mud-built mosques of the north, at Larabanga near Mole and at Nakore near Wa, belong to the Sudano-Sahelian tradition of Timbuktu and Djenné, with timber spikes sticking out of earthen walls. Kawukudi is Istanbul; Larabanga is the Sahel. Both are Ghana.
The mosque stands on a site of about 40 acres, and the complex around it was planned as a centre for the Muslim community and the neighbourhood: offices and a residence for the National Chief Imam, a senior high school, a clinic, a library, a research centre, an auditorium and a conference centre. The Turkish partners said the school and the clinic would serve all Ghanaians, not only Muslims.
For Ghana's Muslims, many of them in the crowded zongo communities of Nima, Maamobi and Kanda right next to the site, the mosque is a source of real pride: after decades on the margins of national life, they have a national building that no one can overlook.
The honest other side: it is also Turkish foreign policy in stone. Across Africa, Turkey has built mosques, schools and hospitals as part of a deliberate push for influence, and the architecture makes no attempt to look Ghanaian. Some Ghanaians ask why the country's national mosque had to be a copy of an Ottoman one rather than something drawing on Ghana's own Islamic building traditions. It is a gift, and a beautiful one, but it is not neutral.
Islam reached what is now northern Ghana along the trade routes from the Sahel many centuries before Christianity arrived on the coast. Muslim traders, scholars and clerics served the courts of Dagbon, Gonja and even Asante. Today Muslims are strongest in the north and in the zongo quarters of every southern city. Ghana is known for peaceful relations between Christians and Muslims: families often include both, and leaders of both faiths regularly appear together at state events.
Guided tours of Accra: the mosque is easiest to combine with the city's other landmarks on a guided tour. Tours below are booked through Viator; Ghana-Net may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.
About 10–15 minutes by taxi.
Nkrumah's monument to pan-Africanism.
About 15–20 minutes south, near the old centre.
Our archive of the museum's collections.
The National Mosque is one of the most striking buildings in Accra and well worth a visit, respectfully dressed and outside prayer times. It gave Ghana's Muslims the national place of worship they had waited for since the 1990s, and it shows the country's religious tolerance at its best. It is also an imported building, paid for by a foreign state with its own interests, in a style that has nothing to do with Ghana's own Islamic heritage. Go and admire it, then go north to Larabanga and see the mud mosque that was standing centuries before anyone in Ankara had heard of Kawukudi.
Verified: 30 September 2026. The commissioning on 16 July 2021 by President Akufo-Addo, the building by the Hudai Foundation with the support of the Turkish government from 2012, the reported cost of about US$10 million, the capacity of 15,000, the site of about 40–42 acres at Kawukudi/Kanda, the four 65-metre minarets, the Blue Mosque model, the facilities of the complex and the 1995 land grant by President Rawlings after the demolition of a mosque for Rawlings Park follow the Ghana News Agency, MyJoyOnline, GBC and Wikipedia. Visitor rules may change; ask at the entrance. Corrections welcome and will be published in full.