Ghana’s full-year 2025 trade data exposes a growing but structurally uneven relationship with Asia, with the region absorbing more than half of the country’s exports while simultaneously dominating the import supply chain, according to provisional figures released by the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) on April 8, 2026.
In the fourth quarter alone, India and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) ranked as Ghana’s top two export destinations, receiving goods worth GH¢27.2 billion and GH¢24.8 billion respectively. Asia collectively absorbed 53.4 percent of Ghana’s total Q4 exports, more than double the 24.9 percent share captured by Europe.
Yet on the import side, it is China, not India or the UAE, that holds the commanding position. China supplied GH¢14.3 billion worth of goods to Ghana in Q4, accounting for 23.3 percent of total imports. The United States, Netherlands, Belgium and Nigeria followed as leading import sources.
The pattern reveals a structural asymmetry: Ghana’s most valuable customers and its largest supplier are three different Asian economies, each operating largely independently. That configuration leaves Ghana’s trade performance exposed to policy shifts, demand slowdowns, or currency movements in markets it has limited leverage over.
The concentration risk deepens at the commodity level. For the full year, gold bullion accounted for 62.9 percent of total export earnings. Cocoa beans and crude petroleum followed, with the three commodities together representing 79.8 percent of annual export revenues. The GSS cautioned that this heavy reliance on a narrow range of primary exports leaves the economy vulnerable to global price volatility and supply disruptions.
That warning carried immediate weight in the Q4 data. While the headline trade surplus reached GH¢47.2 billion in the quarter, up sharply from GH¢16.7 billion in Q3 2025, the GSS confirmed the gain was price-driven. In real terms, Ghana ran a trade deficit during the same period, with inflation-adjusted exports of GH¢30.0 billion falling short of real imports of GH¢31.7 billion.
Within Africa, Ghana sustained a trade surplus in Q4, with continental exports of GH¢18.9 billion outpacing imports of GH¢9.5 billion. South Africa accounted for 63.8 percent of Ghana’s exports to the continent. The GSS attributed the steady expansion in intra-African trade partly to momentum generated by the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), though trade with the continent remains highly concentrated among just five partners.
