Ghana’s two largest productive sectors are growing at sharply different speeds, and the explanation lies not only in global trends or seasonal weather but in where the country’s banks are choosing to lend.
Between January 2024 and February 2026, credit flowing to the services sector reached an estimated GH¢800 billion, while agriculture, forestry and fishing received approximately GH¢90 billion over the same period. The resulting gap of roughly GH¢710 billion is not a footnote in Ghana’s economic data. It is one of the clearest structural explanations for why services consistently outpace farming in GDP growth figures.
The performance numbers track the money almost exactly. In January 2026, services grew at 9.6 percent while agriculture recorded only 4.5 percent expansion, less than half the pace of the services sector, contributing just 14 percent to overall growth despite employing a significant share of the workforce. That pattern has held across multiple quarters. In October 2025, services accounted for nearly 74.7 percent of total economic growth, while agriculture grew at just 0.9 percent and contributed only about 1.3 percent to the overall expansion.
Bank of Ghana data for mid-2025 show services commanding 76.53 percent of credit flows to the private sector, while agriculture, forestry and fisheries received just 4.12 percent. That allocation gap has deep roots. Over the past 25 years, agriculture has averaged only 5.8 percent of total bank credit, compared with 20.7 percent for services, a structural bias that has persisted through multiple governments and policy cycles.
Agriculture accounted for only 4.7 percent of bank lending in 2024, well below the government’s own target of 10 percent by 2028. The reasons are well understood within the banking sector. Farming carries climate and seasonal risk, collateral is harder to establish, and returns are slower to materialise than in trade or telecommunications. These structural disadvantages make lending to agriculture less attractive for banks managing short-term margins, even when the long-term economic case is compelling.
The consequences of this imbalance reach beyond growth statistics. Agriculture supplies the raw materials that sustain Ghana’s agro-processing industries, and without consistent input supply, manufacturing ambitions stall. The Komenda Sugar Factory serves as a widely cited example. Despite significant capital investment, the facility has remained largely dormant due to insufficient domestic sugarcane supply, an outcome that reflects the broader failure to back agricultural production with consistent financial resources.
Food security also sits at risk. Ghana imports rice, tomatoes, onions and poultry at scale. Recent disruptions including temporary restrictions on tomato exports from Burkina Faso and interruptions in onion supplies from Nigeria triggered market anxiety, exposing how thinly the domestic agricultural base is stretched. A more capitalised farming sector could absorb those shocks rather than amplify them.
The government’s 2026 budget acknowledged the problem and allocated GH¢690 million toward 50 Farmer Service Centres and more than 4,000 pieces of agricultural machinery. The administration has set a target of creating 250,000 jobs in the sector through mechanisation and agro-processing. But analysts note that budget allocations and bank lending are separate levers, and public spending alone cannot substitute for the sustained flow of private credit that has transformed the services sector.
Average lending rates remain elevated at 19.7 percent as of February 2026, despite recent declines in the Ghana Reference Rate (GRR). At those rates, most smallholder farmers and agribusinesses cannot service debt on commercially viable terms, and the credit gap between sectors is unlikely to close without deliberate policy intervention.
Closing that GH¢710 billion divide will require more than goodwill. It demands lower risk-adjusted lending rates for agricultural borrowers, credible collateral reform, and sustained political commitment to treating farming as an economic priority rather than a welfare obligation. The services sector has demonstrated what investment-led growth looks like in Ghana. The question is whether the country’s financial architecture will be reconfigured to deliver the same outcome for the sector that still feeds the nation.
