Economist Prof. Isaac Boadi has attributed Ghana’s continued currency weakness to deep structural imbalances in the economy, warning that improving headline indicators are masking a persistent mismatch between foreign exchange demand and supply that monetary policy alone cannot resolve.
Speaking on the Asaase Breakfast Show on Monday, Boadi described the situation as a “striking paradox.” Inflation has fallen sharply, debt metrics have improved, and foreign reserves have strengthened considerably, yet the cedi has lost more than 10 percent of its value against the US dollar in 2026, making it the worst-performing currency in West Africa by current market data.
“Demand for foreign exchange continues to outpace supply,” Boadi said, identifying the energy, manufacturing, and import sectors as the primary sources of that structural demand pressure. He argued the gap was not narrowing organically, with the supply side remaining heavily dependent on mining export receipts and periodic injections from the Bank of Ghana (BoG).
That reliance, he warned, was unsustainable. BoG interventions provide temporary stabilisation, Boadi said, but they risk concealing the underlying imbalance rather than correcting it. Each time the pace of dollar injections slows, he noted, market pressure reasserts itself quickly, revealing how little the structural gap between demand and supply has closed.
The assessment adds a critical perspective to Ghana’s macroeconomic narrative heading into the second half of 2026. Policymakers have highlighted a series of genuine achievements including a steep decline in inflation from its December 2022 peak and a substantial rebuilding of gross international reserves. For economists like Boadi, however, the cedi’s continued slide despite those gains draws a sharp distinction between monetary and fiscal stabilisation on one hand, and the deeper productive capacity and export diversification the economy needs to generate durable foreign exchange supply on the other.
