Ghana’s macroeconomic numbers tell a genuinely encouraging story. Inflation has retreated sharply from the crisis highs of 2022 and 2023. The Bank of Ghana’s (BoG) Monetary Policy Rate (MPR) has fallen from 27 percent at the end of 2024 to 14 percent by March 2026, and average commercial lending rates have tracked downward to around 17.7 percent. The cedi has held its ground. Foreign reserves have reached record levels. By the metrics that central banks are typically judged on, the BoG has delivered.
But the question Ghana must now answer is what it intends to do with the peace it has bought at considerable cost.
The BoG’s interventions came with a heavy balance sheet price. Spending on Open Market Operations (OMO) alone reached GH¢16.7 billion in 2025, nearly double the GH¢8.6 billion recorded in 2024, as the central bank aggressively absorbed excess liquidity to anchor the disinflation cycle. The BoG’s negative equity position, disclosed earlier this year, is the arithmetic result of those decisions. Central banks can operate with negative equity in ways that ordinary institutions cannot, but the moral and political weight of those costs remains real. They represent a transfer of financial stress from the broader economy onto the institution that was the last line of defence.
That sacrifice now creates an obligation for others.
Stabilisation was the BoG’s job and, by most measures, it has been done. The baton has passed. The Ministry of Finance and the private sector now hold it. The test of the next phase is not whether lending rates are lower on paper, but whether that cheaper credit reaches the factories, the farms, the agro-processors, and the manufacturers who can convert it into output. If the current rate environment primarily benefits speculative trading activity, finances government recurrent consumption, or facilitates the importation of goods that Ghana could produce domestically, then the country will have paid a high institutional price for a temporary reprieve rather than a structural transformation.
The Association of Ghana Industries (AGI) has already called on policymakers to channel stability gains into expanded credit for the productive sector, particularly manufacturing. The case is straightforward: a local manufacturer or agro-processor who can now access credit at commercially viable rates and invest in expanding capacity creates jobs, substitutes imports, and adds to the export base. That is the pathway through which the BoG’s losses convert into a national gain. The alternative is a functioning monetary architecture sitting over an economy that still produces little of what it consumes.
Ghana has a history of stabilising and then drifting. The conditions today are as favourable as they have been in years. Interest rates are lower. The cedi is stable. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) programme has provided a framework for discipline. What is needed now is deliberate, targeted deployment of the liquidity space that has been created. That means incentivising commercial banks to lend to productive sectors rather than parking funds in Treasury instruments. It means ensuring that credit guarantee mechanisms exist for manufacturers and agro-processors who lack sufficient collateral. It means the Ministry of Finance treating industrial policy not as an aspiration in a budget speech but as an operational priority with measurable targets.
Stability is necessary but it is not sufficient. It is the precondition for growth, not growth itself. The BoG has prepared the ground. What Ghana plants in it from this point forward will determine whether the sacrifice was a turning point or merely a pause before the next crisis.
