Interest payments on external loans alone by Ghana stood at $937 million at the end of 2020.
This is according to the International Debt Statistics report by the World Bank.
According to the report, interest payments paid by Ghana at the end of 2020 represents some 876 percentage points increment in interest payments by the country.
The report reveals that interest payments by Ghana in 2010 amounted to $96 million, but by the year 2020, interest payments on external loans had jumped to $937 million.
The World Bank report further revealed that external debt in real value terms had more than tripled from the period between 2010 to 2020.
The World Bank notes that as of 2010, total external loans in real value terms amounted to $8.3 billion. However, due to the high demand for external loans by the Ghanaian government to finance budget deficits and undertake key programmes, external debt shot up to $31.1 billion in 2020.
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Of the total external debts, $23.2 billion are long term-dated debts – that is debts that are to be repaid beyond 1 year and more. The remianing $5.03 billion are short term-dated debts – that is debts taht are to be repaid in within a year.
A breakdown of the country’s external debt by the report further revealed that, Ghana owes private creditors $14.1 billion, multilatral creditors a total of $6.4 billion with the IMF owed $2.6 billion and the World Bank $4.4 billion.
The country also as at end-2020 owed foreign bondholders $9 billion.
Currently, Ghana’s external debt stands at Ghs 162.5 billion ($28 billion) at end-July 2021 per the Bank of Ghana’s (BoG) September 2021 Summary of Economic and Financial Data – marking a reduction in external debts as at July 2021 due to less demand for foreign loans.
Interest payments on the country’s external debts presently takes a little over 50 percent of the nation’s tax revenues.
The nation’s overall debt stands at 76.4 percent of GDP and translates into some Ghs 335 billion.
Peruse below Ghana’s debt statistics as detailed by the World Bank:
