Ghana will end its International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout era and shift to a non financing reform partnership, Finance Minister Cassiel Ato Forson told Parliament on Thursday.
Forson said Ghana had completed the final review of its Extended Credit Facility (ECF), the three year, 3 billion dollar programme it entered in 2023, and would move to a 36 month Policy Coordination Instrument (PCI). The new framework keeps Ghana working with the Fund on reforms and assessments but carries no borrowing. The arrangement still requires approval by the IMF Executive Board, which is expected by the end of July.
He told lawmakers that the country no longer needs emergency support and has become a reform partner of the Fund rather than a supplicant. “No further IMF financial bailout will be required in the foreseeable future,” he said, echoing President John Dramani Mahama’s view that the current programme, Ghana’s 17th, should be its last.
Forson credited the turnaround to strict fiscal discipline. He said the economy grew by 6.0 percent in 2025, with non oil gross domestic product (GDP) expanding 7.6 percent, the fastest in 14 years, and crossed 100 billion dollars in size for the first time, ranking Ghana the eighth largest economy in Africa. He added that the debt to GDP ratio fell from 61.8 percent in 2024 to 44.7 percent in 2025, inflation dropped from 23.8 percent in December 2024 to 3.4 percent in April 2026, and the cedi gained 40.7 percent against the United States dollar in 2025.
The minister traced the crisis to 2022, when soaring inflation, a sliding cedi, falling reserves and credit downgrades cut Ghana off from international capital markets. He pointed to the Domestic Debt Exchange Programme of December 2022, which imposed losses on bondholders including pension funds, and to levies he criticised, among them a charge on electronic transfers and a tax on betting.
He said the government had since tightened spending controls, amended public financial management law, set up an Independent Fiscal Council, operated a sinking fund for debt, renegotiated power producer agreements and trimmed the size of government.
Looking ahead, Forson said the government would unveil a strategy called The New Economy in the 2027 Budget, focused on jobs, productivity, resilience and broad based prosperity, as part of Mahama’s Reset Agenda to move from stabilisation toward long term transformation.
