- GFIM Closes Week With GH¢1.26bn Turnover as Investors Favour T-Bills and Restructured Bonds
Trading on the Ghana Fixed Income Market closed the week on a strong note on Friday, August 28, 2026, with total turnover reaching GH¢1.26 billion as investor activity remained heavily concentrated in Treasury bills and bonds issued under Ghana’s Domestic Debt Exchange Programme.
The market recorded 835 transactions during the session, with Treasury bills accounting for the largest share of trading at GH¢536.02 million, equivalent to 42.58% of total turnover.
DDEP bonds followed closely with GH¢506.64 million, representing 40.25% of market activity, while sell/buy-back transactions involving government securities contributed another GH¢216.06 million, or 17.16% of the day’s turnover.
Corporate bond activity remained extremely thin at just GH¢108,195, while no outright trades were recorded in either new Government of Ghana notes and bonds or the legacy pre-DDEP government bond segment.
Excluding sell/buy-back transactions, outright secondary-market turnover stood at approximately GH¢1.04 billion, underscoring the overwhelming dominance of sovereign instruments in Ghana’s fixed-income market.
Treasury bills generated the highest number of trades, with 774 transactions, illustrating continuing investor preference for shorter-duration government securities at a time when the yield curve remains heavily shaped by liquidity conditions, inflation expectations and the gradual rebuilding of confidence following the domestic debt restructuring.
The single largest Treasury bill trade was concentrated in the security maturing on January 18, 2027, which recorded turnover of GH¢70.65 million across 10 transactions.
The instrument closed at a yield of approximately 6.18%, with a closing price of 97.6313, and alone represented about 13.18% of total Treasury bill turnover for the session.
The volume profile nevertheless shows that liquidity was spread across several maturities rather than concentrated entirely in one security.
A Treasury bill maturing on November 23, 2026 recorded turnover of roughly GH¢17.71 million, while securities maturing on November 2 and December 7 also attracted noticeable activity.
That pattern points to continued demand across the short end of the sovereign curve, where investors are able to manage duration risk more tightly while retaining exposure to government paper.
The DDEP market presented an equally significant picture. The February 10, 2032 bond the 2023-GC-6 security carrying a 9.10% coupon dominated the restructured bond segment with turnover of GH¢306.01 million across eight trades.
That single instrument represented approximately 60.40% of all DDEP bond turnover on Friday.
Its closing yield fell to 13.69% from an opening yield of 14.55%, while the closing price rose to 82.6966.
The movement suggests strong demand for the instrument during the session, with the decline in yield and corresponding increase in price pointing to buying interest in the longer-dated restructured government bond.
The February 16, 2027 DDEP bond was the second most actively traded security in the segment, recording turnover of approximately GH¢177.31 million across nine transactions.
Unlike the 2032 bond, however, its yield moved higher during the session, closing at 12.60% from 11.17% at the opening.
That divergence highlights the uneven repricing taking place across the DDEP curve.
Investors appear to be differentiating between maturities rather than moving uniformly across the restructured bond universe, with individual securities responding differently to liquidity demand, duration preferences and expectations for future interest rates.
The February 12, 2030 bond generated another GH¢21.04 million, with its yield easing from 14.11% to 13.63%, while the February 11, 2031 security recorded approximately GH¢1.78 million in turnover and closed at a yield of 13.90%.
Trading in the longer end of the curve was comparatively modest, although small volumes were recorded in the 2033 and 2034 DDEP instruments.
The concentration of more than half of DDEP trading in the 2032 security is noteworthy because it shows that liquidity in Ghana’s post-restructuring bond market remains highly uneven.
A functioning secondary bond market requires investors to be able to enter and exit positions across a broad range of maturities.
Where activity is concentrated in only a handful of benchmark securities, price discovery can remain weak elsewhere on the curve.
The sell/buy-back segment added GH¢216.06 million through 29 transactions, providing another indication of the importance of collateralised government-security transactions to market liquidity.
The largest security in that segment was the February 5, 2036 DDEP bond, which recorded approximately GH¢86.96 million in turnover and was transacted at a yield of 18.39% and a weighted average closing price of about 61.6558.
A February 2035 DDEP security also accounted for a substantial portion of sell/buy-back activity.
Corporate debt remained the weakest component of the market. Only GH¢108,195 changed hands across three transactions, all involving Ghana Cocoa Board securities.
Each of the three COCOBOD bonds maturing in August 2026, August 2027 and August 2028 recorded turnover of GH¢36,065.
The extraordinarily small corporate-market share continues to underline the structural imbalance within Ghana’s fixed-income market.
While GFIM has developed considerable capacity for secondary trading in government securities, corporate issuance and secondary-market liquidity remain limited.
Friday’s numbers reinforce that contrast: sovereign and sovereign-linked securities accounted for virtually the entire market, while corporate bonds contributed less than 0.01% of total turnover.
That concentration matters for the wider economy. A deeper corporate bond market could provide businesses with an alternative to bank lending, improve access to longer-term capital and allow institutional investors such as pension funds and insurers to diversify their portfolios beyond government debt.
For now, however, the government remains overwhelmingly the dominant borrower and source of tradable fixed-income assets.
Friday’s session therefore tells two stories. The first is one of improving liquidity, with more than GH¢1.25 billion changing hands and strong activity across Treasury bills and selected DDEP instruments.
The second is the continuing structural dependence of Ghana’s capital market on sovereign securities.
Treasury bills and DDEP bonds together accounted for 82.83% of total turnover before even including the additional government securities traded through sell/buy-back transactions.
The heavy concentration means developments in government financing, monetary policy and investor expectations over interest rates will continue to determine the direction of the market.
For investors, Friday’s activity showed strong appetite for both short-term government paper and selected longer-dated restructured bonds.
For policymakers, however, the deeper challenge remains unchanged: turning an increasingly active government securities market into a broader debt-capital ecosystem capable of providing meaningful financing to Ghana’s private sector.
