How to Write a CV for Jobs in Ghana: Structure and Samples

A CV is how you explain, on paper, that you can do a job. It is read by someone who has limited time and many applications to compare, so its job is to make your relevant experience easy to find. Nothing you write can promise an interview; what it can do is remove the reason a reader stopped paying attention.

This guide is written for people applying for jobs in Ghana and across Africa, including NGO and development roles. In that context CV and resume are often used for the same thing, and this guide uses “CV” throughout. It covers the sections to include, the wording that makes them useful, and worked samples you can copy the shape of.

Start with the advert, not with your history

A strong CV can still go unread, and one frequent reason is that it answers a different question from the one in the advert. Before writing anything, take the job description and pull out:

the title and the team it sits in
the responsibilities, which tell you what the role actually involves day to day
the essential requirements, which are the gate
the desirable requirements, which are the differentiator
the location and whether the role is on-site, hybrid or remote

Then write each part of your CV against that list. If you cannot meet an essential requirement, you have found out before applying rather than after an interview.

The sections to include, and their order

A CV used for professional and NGO work usually carries these sections. Order them to suit the role, but keep them in one sequence rather than rearranging between applications:

Contact details - name, email, phone, location, and a link to your LinkedIn profile if you have one.
Professional profile - three or four lines on what you do and the kind of role you are seeking.
Work experience - in reverse date order, most recent first.
Education and training - including professional certificates and short courses.
Skills - split into technical and language or working skills.
Additional information - volunteering, publications, professional membership, and languages.

Write entries as evidence, not duties

Most CVs list responsibilities because that is what job descriptions contain. A reader who sees “responsible for report writing” learns nothing they could not already assume. What they need is what you produced.

A duty	Evidence
Responsible for monitoring and evaluation of projects	Built the M&E framework for three community health projects, cutting quarterly reporting time from ten days to four
Worked with donors and partner organisations	Managed reporting to two donors and coordinated four partner NGOs across two districts
Prepared budgets	Prepared and defended the programme budget of GHS 2.4m for board approval
Supported a field team	Trained six field officers on the new data tool, which became the standard for the region

Both columns are format examples, not claims about any real person. Use only figures you can explain in an interview and support if asked. If you do not know a number, describe the scale in words - “a team of six” or “across two districts” - rather than estimating one.

Most real work is done in a team, and the UN is explicit that team-based achievements belong on the application: include them, say you were part of the team, and state the part that was yours. “Supported the community mobilisation team” hides what you did; “delivered three community meetings a week in two districts as the field focal point” says it.

Samples you can copy the shape of

These are format samples. The square brackets mark where you put your own details. They are here to show structure and level of detail, not to be filled in with invented content.

Contact details

[Full name]
[Town or region, country]
[Email address]
[Phone number]
[linkedin.com/in/your-name]

Professional profile

[Job title] with [X] years in [field]. Experience in [two or three specific areas, for example monitoring and evaluation, community mobilisation, donor reporting]. Track record of [one concrete outcome you can defend]. Seeking [the kind of role you want next].

Experience

[Job title] - [Organisation], [Location] · [Month Year] - [Month Year]
Led [what you were responsible for delivering]. [What changed as a result, with a figure or a scale you can support]. [A second, unrelated achievement, on its own line].
Supported [work you contributed to but did not lead].

Education and training

[Qualification] - [Institution], [Location] · [Year]
[Certificate or short course] - [Institution] · [Year]

Skills

Technical: [tool, method or standard you actually use]
Languages: [language - level]
Working: [the skill named in the advert that you genuinely have]

How long it should be

There is no rule about one page or two. A CV that fits on one page because it leaves out the work that qualifies you is worse than a longer one. Length follows from how much relevant experience you have and how many roles you are applying for.

Two practical tests:

Senior or specialist roles usually need more depth, because the relevant evidence is further back in your history.
Early-career roles can be shorter, because there is less history to describe - but only if you add something else, such as volunteer work, coursework or a relevant project.

Whatever the length, keep it on one font, sensible margins and consistent spacing. Dense blocks of text with no breaks are what make a long CV unreadable, not the page count.

Personal details: what is expected varies

Date of birth, nationality, religion and marital status are the details people argue about most, and honest advice here has to be short: there is no single rule, and anyone who gives you one without naming the employer or form is guessing.

If the application form asks for something, give it - accurately. The form is the authority on what that employer wants, and declining to complete a required field is a different decision from choosing what to put on a CV you are sending on your own initiative.
Some employers do screen on age and nationality as part of eligibility. The UN, for example, states that applications are screened automatically against pre-established rules including age, academic qualifications and length of work experience.
For a CV you are sending unsolicited, include the personal details the role clearly needs for the work - often a country or city - and leave the rest out.

If you are unsure whether something is required, ask the employer before applying rather than guessing either way.

What to leave out

Your CV may not be the document that gets read

This surprises people, and it is worth checking before you spend a weekend on formatting. In the United Nations system the application is assessed on an online application form, and a CV is not accepted as a substitute for it. Not every employer works this way, so the first question to ask of any application is simply: what does this employer actually assess?

The UN puts this plainly: resumes “are not considered a substitute or complementary to a completed online application”. The form is also where its screening happens - the UN describes an automatic screening process run against pre-established rules on age, academic qualifications, length of work experience and the other conditions set by the job opening.

The practical consequence: treat the online form as the application, and the CV as supporting material. People routinely polish a CV and then type rushed answers into the form, which is backwards. If the form is long, draft your answers in a separate document first and paste them in - the UNDP recommends exactly this, to reduce errors and time-outs.

Follow the employer’s instructions, not general rules

General CV advice is a starting point. The advert in front of you overrides it. Things employers ask for that candidates routinely miss:

A separate cover letter for each role. UNDP states you are expected to write a separate and relevant cover letter for each position, not one reused letter.
The language of the vacancy. The UNDP asks that the cover letter be written in the language shown beside the vacancy notice, which is the language of the duty station.
Required versus desirable criteria. UN guidance is to apply only where you meet the required criteria; the desirable ones are optional.
How you spent your time. The UNDP asks candidates to say whether each role was full-time or part-time, using percentage estimates - so that overlapping dates are visible rather than looking like an error.
Unpaid work, labelled as unpaid. The UNDP asks that unpaid volunteer positions and internships be identified clearly as such.
Overlapping dates. Consultancies and short contracts often overlap. The UNDP asks that you avoid overlapping employment periods unless you add explanatory text, and this applies to a CV too: overlapping dates without explanation read as a mistake.
Whether anyone charges a fee. The UN does not charge a fee at any stage of its recruitment process. If an “agent” offers to submit an application for money, that is not how these employers recruit.

Make the file readable by a machine

Many larger employers and recruitment platforms read submitted files through software before a person opens them. The systems differ, and no formatting choice guarantees anything, but the vendors document their own failure modes and they are consistent.

The failure their documentation describes most often is a file that is an image rather than text - a CV that was scanned, photocopied or photographed and saved as a PDF looks perfect to a person and contains no readable text to a system. The test takes seconds: open the file, select all and copy. If nothing comes out, or the text arrives scrambled, the file will not read properly.

Check the text is selectable using the copy test above.
Use conventional section headings - “Work Experience”, “Education”, “Skills”, “Contact”. Software recognises these; a heading like “Where I’ve Been” may not be identified as a section at all.
Keep contact details in the body text, not in a header, footer, text box or sidebar. Content placed there is commonly skipped.
Prefer a single column. Multi-column and sidebar layouts are documented to disrupt the reading order.
Do not rely on images to carry information. Heavy image use, decorative fonts and text over busy backgrounds are all documented as causes of poor reading.
Make sure your email address is plain text in the file. Systems use it as the unique identifier, and a file where it cannot be read may be rejected outright.
Follow the size limit the portal states. Published ceilings differ between systems, so the number on the form is the one that applies to you.

If you use an AI tool while applying

Plenty of candidates now use AI to help with applications, and a number of large employers now publish their position on it rather than leaving candidates to guess.

Reasonable uses: checking spelling, grammar and clarity; improving structure and layout; analysing a job advert to see what it is really asking for; researching an organisation; practising interview questions.
Where a policy is published, read what it permits. CGI’s, for example, says you “can use AI to check spelling or structure, but the content must be your own words”, and tells candidates to avoid submitting AI-written CVs or personal statements, generic or templated answers, and especially adding skills or experience that are not genuinely yours.
Check whether this employer has stated a policy, and follow it. You cannot infer one employer’s rule from another’s. Some published policies encourage the kind of editing described above; others restrict it. Read the employer’s own careers pages and anything the advert says, and treat that as the rule. The University of Sheffield’s careers service makes the same point: employer attitudes vary considerably, so check the guidance that employer has given rather than assuming.
Do not paste personal data into a tool. Remove identifying details from anything you use for feedback, and check how a tool handles what you give it.
Verify anything it tells you. AI output can be confidently wrong about an employer, a programme or a deadline. Check facts against the employer’s own site, not against the tool.
Preparation is different from producing the answer. Practising interview questions or organising your thoughts beforehand is preparation. Using a tool to answer a question in the moment, or to produce the work in an assessment or test, is a different act - and CGI’s published policy rules it out for its own process, stating that candidates may not use AI to formulate responses to specific application questions or to use it during an interview for any reason.

None of this is universal. These are the rules particular employers have published for their own processes. What is not in dispute is the part all of them agree on: the claims on the application have to be yours, and true.

Nothing about using these tools carefully makes you a stronger candidate. What makes you a stronger candidate is specific, defensible evidence of your own work.

Write it so the interview is easier

A CV is rarely the last document involved. Shortlisted candidates are commonly asked to complete a written exercise, a technical test or a competency-based interview, and the UN describes the competency-based interview as its preferred method, where the panel asks for examples of how you handled a situation or task.

That means the evidence you write down now is the same evidence you will be asked to talk through later. If a CV entry is vague, the interview answer will be too. Keep a short private list of your own examples - situation, what you did, what happened, and what you would do differently - and you will not be searching for them in the week of the interview.

A worked example

The example below is constructed to show the change. It is not a real person, and no figure in it should be copied without being true of you.

A monitoring officer applying for an M&E role had a CV listing four employers as “Responsible for data collection”, “Prepared progress reports”, “Coordinated with partners” and “Supported the team” - every line true and none of it checkable. She took the advert, which asked for someone who could build a monitoring framework and present to donors, and rewrote the most recent role to say she built the framework for three community health projects and cut quarterly reporting time from ten days to four. She moved donor reporting up because it matched a requirement, moved volunteer experience into a shorter section, and deleted her home address and date of birth. Nothing about her experience changed. What changed is that a reader could now tell whether she had done the work.

Note what the revision did not do. It did not add a qualification she does not have, and it did not claim an outcome she cannot support. It reorganised real evidence so that it matched the advert.

Before you send

Save it in the format the application asks for. If that is PDF, check the text is selectable - see the section on machine readability.
Name the file with your name and the role, so it is findable later.
Read it once for facts: every date, employer and qualification matches reality.
Read it once as the hiring manager, checking only the first third - that is usually where the decision is made.
Have someone else read it, or read it aloud, to catch the sentence you have stopped seeing.
Check the file name, the email subject line and that the attachment is the CV you meant to send.

What to do next

5 CV mistakes and how to avoid them
Writing a cover letter with examples - the CV gets you read; the letter explains why you are writing
Improving your LinkedIn profile - many roles are found there rather than through an advert
Preparing for an interview
More job search articles

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