Insurance companies are stepping in to fill the funeral financing void in Ghana’s growing middle class, where celebrations of life are among the most important social events, according to a Bloomberg report.

The desire for increasingly extravagant funeral ceremonies led to calls for restraint from Ghanaian religious and ethnic leaders, which have fallen mostly on deaf ears, the report said.

Lasting for days, funeral ceremonies, typically called celebrations in Ghana, involve church services, receptions and burials. Families spend thousands of cedis on food and drink, shaded seating, a disc jockey or band, traditional drummers, brochures, posters, photographers and often, a videographer capturing mourners filing by the casket.

Newspapers carry full-color obituaries that list chief mourners and far-flung relatives. Families are turning to the banks to seek funds.

Led by a boost in oil production, Ghana’s economy grew to 15.9 percent in 2011, up from 3.1 percent in 2007. Gross national income per capita increased almost fivefold to $1,550 over the last decade, according to Bloomberg.

While relatives traditionally contributed to meet funeral costs, those donations are no longer enough and insurance companies are stepping in to cover the gap.

The country’s biggest insurers including Enterprise Life and SIC Insurance Co. are benefiting, said Anastacia Arko, an analyst at Accra-based Databank Financial Services Ltd.

“When the burden to finance funerals became so high that people began taking out bank loans, we saw there was space for insurance,” said C.C. Bruce, executive director of Enterprise Life, a unit of Enterprise Group Ltd.

The funeral insurance policy is now the company’s “flagship product,” accounting for more than 65 percent of revenue, Bruce said in the  Bloomberg report. The insurer covers as many as 900,000 Ghanaians out of a population of 24.7 million, with a majority ages 30 to 45. Lump sums of as much as 5,000 cedis are paid out.

Enterprise’s shares have almost tripled in 2013, the second-best performance on the 35-member Ghana Stock Exchange Composite Index, which has gained 61 percent.

“Funeral costs are high,” Arko said. “People are becoming sensitized to take up life policies.”

The biggest insurance company in Ghana, SIC Insurance, plans to increase the payout of its funeral policy as customers complain of rising expenses, said Alfred Ankrah, funeral policy manager at SIC.

“We have a policy targeting the so-called upper class that pays out 10,000 cedis, but still people say it’s not enough,” Ankrah said. “There is a call from society to prevent expensive funerals, but it’s not working because people want to make sure that the person they lost sleeps in peace.”

Stanbic Bank Ltd., the Ghanaian unit of South Africa’s Standard Bank Group, introduced funeral insurance plans in 2012, offering a lump sum of 1,000 cedis at monthly premiums of as little as 2.50 cedis. Ghana’s minimum daily wage is 5.24 cedis.

Death and money are inextricably linked in Ghana because funerals are meant to both celebrate the life of the deceased and show the success of a family. Flamboyant funerals carry more social prestige than any other ceremony, said South Africa’s Standard Bank Group, Marleen de Witte, an anthropologist at the University of Amsterdam who researched Ghana’s funeral economy, in the Bloomberg report.

“Most Ghanaians agree that they are spending too much money on funerals, but as soon as somebody in their own family dies, the social pressure to hold an impressive funeral proves very hard to resist,” she said.