Senior Bank of Ghana (BoG) officials have defended the central bank’s GH¢9.1 billion loss from its Domestic Gold Purchase Programme (DGPP) in 2025, arguing the cost was a necessary and calculated price for the cedi stability the country now enjoys.
Speaking on TV3’s Key Points programme on Saturday, May 2, 2026, Gershon Kudjo Agbledzorwu, Head of the Financial Markets Department, described the cedi’s 41 percent appreciation in 2025 as a correction of years of accumulated currency weakness rather than a sign of overvaluation.
“What we saw in 2025, which is about 41 percent appreciation, is a kind of correction that we observed,” he said. “Many of our fund parties have also confirmed that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is of the view that this is what we called a new reversion. We also see that think tanks come out with studies to show that our currency is not overvalued at all.”
Agbledzorwu said the central bank expects stability to persist. “Going forward, we expect the currency to be stable, and once our currency is stable, we don’t expect the sharp appreciation we have seen, and therefore the issues from the significant revaluation loss that we saw may not be there,” he added.
Paul Bleboo, Head of Gold Management at the Bank of Ghana, provided a detailed defence of the programme itself. He acknowledged the scale of the loss but placed it within the broader context of the macroeconomic crisis the programme was designed to address. He noted that while the gross loss from the programme totalled GH¢21 billion, the net cost carried by the central bank was GH¢9.1 billion.
“We all saw what happened in 2025 and we are all witnesses to the economic stability we are enjoying, the currency stability. Definitely, there is a cost to it,” Bleboo said.
He traced the origins of the programme back to the economic shocks triggered by the Covid pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war, which placed severe downward pressure on the cedi from 2021 onwards. The central bank’s response, he explained, was to leverage gold as a reserve asset.
“We had to think outside the box. We realised that gold is a reserve asset. What we can do is to leverage on these two things: use the local cedi to buy the gold, export the gold, refine it, and add to our reserves,” he said.
The Bank of Ghana’s 2025 Financial Report, released on April 30, 2026, confirmed the GH¢9.05 billion loss from the DGPP, compared to GH¢5.66 billion in 2024. The gold programme figure forms part of the central bank’s wider net loss of GH¢15.6 billion for the year. Despite the accounting losses, Ghana’s gross international reserves climbed from US$9.1 billion at the end of 2024 to US$13.8 billion by the close of 2025, and approximately 111 tonnes of gold were accumulated under the programme compared to less than one tonne in 2021. The Gold for Oil component of the programme was discontinued in March 2025.
The Bank has entered a recapitalisation agreement with the Ministry of Finance spanning 2026 to 2032 to address the widening negative equity position on its balance sheet.
