Ghana’s persistent currency instability is rooted in a structural failure to retain export earnings rather than any weakness in export performance itself, economist and Dalex Finance Chief Executive Officer Joe Jackson said Tuesday, delivering the 2026 Dean of Business School Lecture Series at the University of Professional Studies, Accra (UPSA).
Jackson told an audience of academics, policymakers, and business leaders that the cedi’s turbulent history is widely misread, and that misreading has driven policy responses that repeatedly miss the point. The cedi lost nearly 71 percent of its value against the United States dollar between 2016 and 2024, then swung sharply in the opposite direction with a 40 percent appreciation between 2024 and 2025. Jackson described the trajectory not as decline or recovery but as a symptom of unresolved structural weakness.
“A volatile cedi is not just an economic problem. It is a discipline problem in disguise,” he said.
The conventional explanation — that the cedi weakens because Ghana does not export enough — does not hold up against the data, Jackson argued. Ghana has recorded trade surpluses in recent years, including a $5.1 billion surplus in 2024. The problem, he said, is what happens after the foreign exchange arrives. Service imports, profit repatriation, debt servicing, and capital flight together drained nearly $8 billion from the economy in 2024 alone, more than wiping out that surplus.
The gold sector illustrated the scale of the leakage most sharply. Ghana exported approximately $11.9 billion worth of gold but retained less than half of that value domestically. Jackson noted that South Africa and Botswana retain a significantly larger share of their export earnings despite generating lower export volumes, pointing to a structural gap in how Ghana manages its resource wealth.
Jackson acknowledged the Ghana Gold Board (GoldBod) as a meaningful intervention, crediting it with centralising gold purchases, aligning local prices with international benchmarks, and drawing artisanal miners into the formal economy. Early estimates indicate the initiative could lift gold export value by 75 percent, with small-scale mining output contributing more than double its previous level. But he was clear that GoldBod addresses only part of the problem.
“Kudos to GoldBod, but the leakages remain,” he said, noting that service imports, profit repatriation, and debt servicing continue to draw down the country’s foreign exchange reserves regardless of how much gold is exported.
Jackson also identified inflation as a parallel and equally corrosive threat. Ghana’s inflation surged to 54 percent in 2022 and remained elevated well into 2024, far above United States inflation rates over the same period. That gap, he said, drives up import costs, pushes interest rates higher, and erodes the incentive to hold the cedi over time. “Inflation silently erodes the value of the cedi from within,” he said.
Sustainable exchange rate stability, Jackson concluded, requires simultaneous action on both fronts. On the external side, Ghana must deepen local participation in its extractive industries, build domestic supply chains, and increase value addition before export. On the domestic side, fiscal discipline and prudent monetary policy are non-negotiable.
Failure to address either dimension, he said, leaves the cedi exposed regardless of how strong trade performance appears on paper.
