Argentina Face Cape Verde as World Cup Last 32 Confirmed

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Argentina Face Cape Verde as World Cup Last 32 Confirmed

The 2026 World Cup group stage closed Sunday with the full Round of 32 bracket set, placing Argentina against Cape Verde, France against Sweden, and Portugal against Croatia.

Tournament host Canada open the knockout phase Sunday night against South Africa, the first of 16 matches that will reduce the field from 32 nations to 16.

Sunday’s late results settled the bracket’s final spaces. DR Congo came from behind to beat Uzbekistan and earned a last 32 tie against group winners England. Colombia and Portugal drew 0-0 in Group K; Colombia advance as group leaders and face Ghana, while Portugal play Croatia.

The full fixture list: Germany versus Paraguay, France versus Sweden, South Africa versus Canada, Netherlands versus Morocco, Portugal versus Croatia, United States versus Bosnia, Belgium versus Senegal, Brazil versus Japan, Ivory Coast versus Norway, Mexico versus Ecuador, England versus DR Congo, Argentina versus Cape Verde, Australia versus Egypt, Colombia versus Ghana, Switzerland versus Algeria, Spain versus Austria.

Argentina against Cape Verde will draw the widest attention. The South Americans are among the strongest title contenders in the field. Cape Verde’s place in the last 32, reached through a tournament that now takes 48 nations and gives more countries a route into the knockout stage than the previous format allowed, sets up one of the round’s most uneven matchups on paper.

Netherlands against Morocco carries its own weight. The two sides last met at the 2022 World Cup quarter final in Qatar, a match the Dutch won. Morocco that year reached the last four, the furthest any African nation has advanced in the competition.

Brazil face Japan. England play DR Congo. Belgium take on Senegal. Germany meet Paraguay and Spain face Austria in matches that favour Europe’s established powers.

Ghana Coach Queiroz Warns Expanded World Cup Losing Value

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Ghana Coach Queiroz Warns Expanded World Cup Losing Value

Ghana coach Carlos Queiroz questioned Sunday whether expanding the World Cup to 48 nations has drained it of meaning, speaking after his side fell 2-1 to Croatia in Philadelphia.

Queiroz, who has coached national sides on four continents, said football’s governing body risked turning the tournament into something routine. The argument carries a specific irony: Ghana is one of nine African nations at the 2026 finals, up from five when the field was capped at 32.

“Where we used to talk about football, it is now moneyball,” Queiroz said.

He contended that scarcity is what gives the World Cup its weight. Tough qualification, he said, is not incidental to the competition’s prestige. It is the point. Once most nations can qualify, the prize shifts.

The 2026 tournament, hosted across the United States, Canada, and Mexico, is the first under the new structure, which the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) approved in 2017 under president Gianni Infantino. Expansion was pitched as a way to bring more of the world into football’s biggest event.

Ghana remain in the running despite Sunday’s defeat. Queiroz, who guided Portugal through two World Cups and also took charge of Iran and Colombia before arriving with the Black Stars, did not frame his comments as post-match frustration. His challenge was to the format itself.

Minority Leader Says Gold Focus Hurts Ghana’s Farmers

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Minority Leader Says Gold Focus Hurts Ghana’s Farmers

Minority Leader Alexander Afenyo-Markin has accused the government of neglecting agriculture to fund its gold programme, though his loss figure went well beyond what the International Monetary Fund (IMF) reported.

Speaking to members of the Tertiary Students Confederacy (TESCON), the New Patriotic Party’s student wing, the Minority Leader said the government had poured its energy into the Ghana Gold Board, known as GoldBod, while letting farming slide. Money lost on gold, he argued, could have supported farmers and brought down food prices.

His central figure does not match the record. The Minority Leader said the IMF had reported losses above nine billion. The Fund’s December report actually put them at about 214 million dollars, roughly 2.4 billion cedis, and tied them to the Bank of Ghana’s gold for reserves programme rather than to GoldBod. The board’s chief executive, Sammy Gyamfi, says GoldBod itself made a surplus.

The losses have been a running argument. The IMF flagged the 214 million dollars as a risk to the central bank’s finances and urged the government to record them on the national books. GoldBod and the central bank dispute how the figure should be treated, noting that the gold programme earned more than 10 billion dollars in foreign exchange in 2025 and helped steady the cedi.

The Minority Leader ranged wider, questioning why the government had not advanced Agenda 111, the previous administration’s hospital programme, and pointing to a reported rift between the agriculture and finance ministries. On food, he said local staples were losing to imports. “It is cheaper to import rice than to locally produce rice,” he told the students.

The government has not cast gold and farming as a choice between the two. It presents GoldBod as a way to build reserves and support the cedi, and points to its own agriculture plans. The exchange adds to a months long clash between the Minority and the gold board over how Ghana’s gold earnings, and their costs, should be counted.

Mahama Backs Five Year Terms for Political Office

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Mahama Backs Five Year Terms for Political Office

President John Mahama says his government intends to extend the terms of Ghana’s political office holders from four to five years, reviving a contested constitutional reform during his regional tour.

Mahama made the remarks at a stakeholder engagement in the Central Region during his Resetting Ghana tour. He said members of parliament, the President, assembly members and district chief executives should all serve five year terms, arguing that four years leaves a government too little time to govern, with the first year lost to setting up and the last consumed by campaigning.

The idea is not new. It is the headline recommendation of the Constitution Review Committee (CRC), the eight member body chaired by Professor Kwasi Prempeh that handed its report to Mahama in December. The committee judged Ghana’s four year term too short and below the regional and global norm, and proposed five years for the presidency.

Two points temper the announcement. The committee’s chair has said the longer term would not apply to Mahama himself, who was elected under the current four year rules and must leave office in 2029. And because the presidential term is entrenched in the 1992 Constitution, any change would need a national referendum, not just a vote in Parliament.

The review went wider than tenure. It also recommended barring members of parliament from serving as ministers and electing district chief executives, who are now appointed. The five year term has drawn open opposition, with some lawyers and politicians arguing that four years is enough and that Ghana’s problems lie in waste and weak delivery, not the length of a term.

Mahama has promised to publish the full report and to carry the review into an implementation phase that would turn its proposals into draft amendments. Whether the five year term becomes law will rest with Parliament and, on the entrenched clauses, with voters at a referendum.

Young Ghanaians Offer Five Point Roadmap to Create Jobs

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Young Ghanaians Offer Five Point Roadmap to Create Jobs

Young Ghanaians at a World Bank youth forum in Accra have put forward a five point plan to turn the region’s young population into job creators rather than job seekers.

The delegates were among about 300 young leaders the World Bank gathered for its Western and Central Africa (AFW) Youth Forum, held in Accra last Monday and run at the same time across seven countries under the theme Youth Works, Africa Thrives. Ghana’s session focused on entrepreneurship and youth led innovation, and its proposals fed into a regional dialogue with delegates from Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon, Guinea, Niger, Nigeria and Senegal.

The forum met against a stark backdrop. The World Bank counts about 196 million young people in the region and says a child born there today will reach only 38 percent of their productive potential, a shortfall it blames on weak education and training.

The young people built their plan around five moves. The first targets mindset: campaigns and platforms to convince students they can solve problems and to ease their unease about artificial intelligence, which many see as both a threat to jobs and a source of new ones. The second urges universities, technical schools and employers to design courses together so graduates leave with skills firms actually use. The third calls for better storytelling about African invention, through media, film and music, to shift a perception that innovation happens elsewhere.

The fourth seeks training matched to each stage of a young person’s path, from secondary school through tertiary study and into work, rather than one size programmes. The fifth tackles money: anchor funds that cut the risk for lenders and steer patient capital to untested ideas, easing the collateral barriers that lock many young founders out of credit.

The convening World Bank official, Michelle Keane, tied the agenda to partnership. “Sustainable job creation happens when policy, investment and entrepreneurship come together,” she said. The youth proposals form Ghana’s input to a regional plan the bank intends to carry to its leadership.

The recommendations are advice, not commitments, and Ghana’s own figures show the scale of the task. Numbers presented at the forum put new jobs over the past decade at about 435,000 against some 3.7 million young people who joined the labour force. Whether the roadmap shifts that balance will depend on what governments, schools and investors now do with it.

Fintech Widens SME Credit but Africa’s Gap Persists

Roger A. Agana
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Fintech Widens SME Credit but Africa’s Gap Persists

Ten years of digital lending have widened credit for Africa’s small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), yet a financing gap the International Finance Corporation (IFC) puts near 330 billion dollars remains unclosed.

The IFC estimates that micro, small and medium sized firms across the developing world face an annual credit shortfall of about 5.2 trillion dollars, including roughly 330 billion in Sub Saharan Africa, though some World Bank figures put the regional gap lower. The region’s small firms generate most of its jobs and a large share of output, yet only about one in ten holds the records a bank needs to lend against.

Digital lenders have chipped at that barrier by reading alternative data, mobile money records, utility bills and online sales, to judge borrowers who lack formal accounts. World Bank researchers say such methods can cut the cost of serving a small loan sharply and shorten approval from weeks to minutes.

The shift has not matched early promises. In Kenya, the birthplace of mobile money, digital lenders advanced only a fraction of what banks lent to small firms, a sign that technology has so far complemented traditional credit rather than replaced it.

Speed has carried a cost. Some mobile lenders charge fees that, annualised, run into triple digits, and parts of the market have drifted towards over indebtedness. Regulators in several African countries have started tightening rules on pricing disclosure and data use.

Development finance institutions are trying to widen the funnel. The IFC has launched a platform of about 4 billion dollars to back banks, non bank lenders, microfinance houses and digital startups that serve smaller firms, part of an effort to draw private capital into a market it has long called underserved.

Whether that narrows the gap will turn on more than technology. Patchy internet, unreliable power and thin records still keep many businesses out of reach, and lenders concede that data driven credit only works where the data exists. The tools have widened the door. They have not yet opened the market.

Ghana Risks Repeating Gold Failures With Lithium, Expert Warns

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Ghana Risks Repeating Gold Failures With Lithium, Expert Warns

Ghana risks wasting its coming lithium wealth as it did with gold, a transparency expert warned, unless it fixes how mining money is spent and why supply contracts leak abroad.

Dr. Steve Manteaw, a co chair of the Ghana Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (GHEITI), spoke at a media and civil society workshop on corruption risks in Ghana’s lithium sector, organised by the Natural Resource Governance Institute. With Ghana preparing to mine lithium at Ewoyaa, he said the gold sector’s record should serve as a warning.

Successive GHEITI reports, he said, show royalties meant for local development being spent on recurrent costs that leave little behind. In the Wassa area, he added, community royalty shares went towards funeral donations, while assemblies elsewhere put the money into canopies and event logistics ahead of elections and presidential visits.

Sanitation swallows much of the rest, he argued, even though assemblies are meant to fund it from property rates. He called the pattern an abuse and pressed for binding rules that would steer royalties into lasting projects rather than day to day spending.

His sharper point concerned procurement, which he called the largest share of mining’s value, about a third of a company’s spending and far bigger than taxes. Ghana lists 56 categories of goods and services miners should buy locally, he said, yet the policy is hollow in practice. “When Ghanaians get the contract, they go to China,” he said, importing the goods and pocketing the margin instead of building local industry.

The result, he said, is a mining sector barely connected to the rest of the economy. Lithium would change nothing, he warned, if Ghana carried the same habits into Ewoyaa, and success should be judged by the jobs, businesses and infrastructure mining leaves behind, not by export earnings alone.

He drew a contrast with what mining firms spend themselves, noting that Gold Fields built the road from Damang to Tarkwa after paying its taxes, while the public share of benefits showed less to point to. Manteaw urged journalists and civil society groups to probe how resource revenues are used, rather than stopping at contracts and royalty figures. He wanted to open a newspaper one day, he said, and read about why Ghana has not built a Johannesburg of its own.

Mahama Expands Sentuo Refinery to Curb Fuel Imports

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Mahama Expands Sentuo Refinery to Curb Fuel Imports

President John Mahama has broken ground to more than double the Chinese built Sentuo refinery in Tema, part of a drive to refine Ghana’s own crude and cut fuel imports.

Mahama cut the sod on Thursday for the second phase of the Sentuo Oil Refinery, which will lift processing capacity from 40,000 to 100,000 barrels a day. Energy and Green Transition Minister John Jinapor attended, alongside China’s ambassador to Ghana and Sentuo’s executive chairman, Xu Ningquan.

The expansion is set to raise the plant’s workforce from about 700 to 1,500 and add roughly three million tonnes of annual refining capacity, placing Tema among the larger refining sites in West Africa.

The bigger prize for the government is value. Ghana exports crude oil yet spends heavily importing petrol, diesel and other refined fuels, and Mahama framed the expansion as a way to keep more of that value at home. “Ghana must increasingly process its own resources,” he said, pointing to a recent decision to allocate one million barrels of Jubilee field crude for refining at Sentuo.

He set a wider goal of turning Ghana from a fuel importer into a supplier to its neighbours. At full capacity, and trading under the African Continental Free Trade Area, the country could sell refined products across West Africa, where demand is climbing.

Whether the plant delivers will turn on steady crude supplies, competitive costs, reliable power and clear pricing rules. Ghana’s record offers reason for caution. The state owned Tema Oil Refinery has been hobbled for years by debt and breakdowns, and private refiners will only retain value at home if they can run efficiently against established rivals abroad.

Much will also hinge on how far Ghanaian firms win the engineering, maintenance and supply work the refinery generates. Mahama has tied the plant to a revived state refinery and to new onshore drilling in the Voltaian Basin, which the national oil company plans to begin before the end of 2026, as part of a wider bet on Ghana’s petroleum chain.

World Bank Economist Tells Ghanaian Youth to Stop Waiting

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World Bank Economist Tells Ghanaian Youth to Stop Waiting

A World Bank economist has urged Ghana’s youth to stop waiting on government for jobs and build their own opportunities, warning that a decade of growth has barely dented unemployment.

Dr. Ashwini Sebastian, the World Bank’s Senior Agriculture Economist for Ghana and West Africa, spoke at the bank’s Western and Central Africa Youth Forum in Accra last week. She said Ghana’s economy, growing at around 6 percent a year over the past decade, had added only about 435,000 jobs while some 3.7 million young people joined the labour force.

Waiting for the state to close that gap, she argued, was futile. “Depending on the government to solve your problem, it won’t get solved,” she told the forum, pressing young people to treat initiative and enterprise as the surer route to a livelihood.

She was blunter still about civic engagement. After four years in Ghana, she said, she had seen far less youth advocacy than in other African countries, pointing to Kenya, where young people staged mass protests, as a sign that frustration should turn into pressure rather than silence.

Her prescription leaned on enterprise. Young people with a strong idea, she said, should learn the field, start small and trust that financing follows effort rather than comes before it. She cited Hello Tractor, an African platform that links farmers with tractor owners through an app, arguing its founders built and proved the business before chasing scale.

She questioned why Ghana had not produced more ventures of that size, saying the ideas exist but founders must aim past the startup stage.

The forum ran across seven countries in the region under the theme Youth Works, Africa Thrives. By the World Bank’s estimate, a child born in West or Central Africa today will reach only 38 percent of their productive potential, a shortfall it blames on gaps in education and workforce preparation.

Employers Spend More on Wellbeing but Gains Stall

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Employers Spend More on Wellbeing but Gains Stall

United States employers are pouring more money into staff wellbeing, yet workforce health and productivity have stalled, new research shows, as controlling health care costs becomes their main motive.

MetLife’s 2026 Employee Benefit Trends Study, based on surveys last October of about 2,480 human resources leaders and 2,541 full time workers, found 60 percent of employers had raised benefit spending and 62 percent had widened non medical offerings such as dental, disability and financial wellness plans. Employers expect $2.30 back for every $1 put into employee health, through higher output, stronger retention and lower medical bills.

The payoff has been elusive. Only 44 percent of employees describe themselves as in good overall health, and engagement, productivity and loyalty scores sat flat against the previous year even as spending climbed. For the first time since 2022, employers named controlling health care costs their top benefits goal, ahead of productivity, loyalty and hiring.

Cost is the pressure behind both the spending and the caution. More than eight in ten employees rank rising living and medical costs as their main source of stress, half put off care because of out of pocket bills, and workers lose about six days a year to health problems.

Wellbeing specialists argue the money works only when it changes how a company runs. The Global Wellness Institute said leading employers are moving away from standalone perks and instead building health into leadership, workflow design and performance reviews, a shift it expects to define 2026.

MetLife’s head of United States group benefits, Todd Katz, urged employers to invest “beyond simply expanding the menu of options,” tying a stronger workforce to smarter design rather than longer benefit lists.

Researchers have long tied healthier workforces to better balance sheets. Work by the University of Oxford found firms with higher employee wellbeing scores tend to post stronger profits and stock returns. The harder part, analysts say, is that those gains follow real changes to workload and culture, not one off perks.

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