- Ghana’s Fixed-Income Market Trades GH¢2.21bn, Led by DDEP Bonds
The clearest signal from Ghana’s fixed-income market on Friday was not a broad shift in investor demand. It was concentration: trading was dominated by a small number of restructured government bonds, while activity in corporate debt remained slight.
Treasury bills generated the most transactions, but the largest volumes clustered in a handful of longer-dated domestic debt exchange instruments.
The Ghana Fixed Income Market reported approximately GH¢2.21 billion in outright trading volume across domestic debt exchange bonds, Treasury bills and corporate bonds on November 13.
Domestic Debt Exchange Programme bonds accounted for GH¢1.62 billion, or about 73.59% of that total.
Treasury bills contributed GH¢571.14 million, while corporate bonds added GH¢11.48 million. The report recorded no outright volume in new government bonds, old government bonds, commercial paper, or green and sustainable bonds.
Those figures describe one trading session, not a trend. But they offer a snapshot of where market activity was concentrated and raise a question for policymakers and investors: how deep is a market when large reported volumes depend heavily on a narrow set of government securities?
The activity in DDEP bonds was particularly concentrated. Three securities the 2032, 2029 and 2030 bonds—accounted for about 78.90% of the category’s reported volume. The 2032 bond recorded GH¢723.69 million across five trades.
The 2029 bond saw GH¢376.13 million across nine trades, while GH¢363.57 million in the 2030 bond was recorded across three trades.
That distribution matters. Large volumes can indicate that investors are willing to transact, but they do not by themselves show that liquidity is available across the market.
When trading centres on just a few securities, investors looking to buy or sell other bonds may still face limited counterparties or difficulty finding a price.
The DDEP bond sheet reported closing yields of 14.17% on the 2029 bond, 14.81% on the 2030 bond and 14.77% on the 2032 bond. The 2037 and 2038 bonds closed at 14.82% and 15.01%, respectively, though each recorded only one trade.
These are security-level observations from the session, not a market-wide average or evidence of a general change in yields.
Prices also varied across the traded DDEP securities. The 2029 bond closed at 89.60, the 2030 bond at 84.85 and the 2032 bond at 79.71. A bond’s quoted price below 100 does not, on its own, explain the return an investor will earn; yield, coupon payments, maturity and the terms attached to the instrument all matter.
Still, the spread of prices and yields across maturities underlines why investors assess each bond individually rather than treating “government debt” as a single asset.
Treasury bills told a different story. Their reported GH¢571.14 million in volume was spread over 284 trades, compared with 19 trades in DDEP bonds and three in corporate bonds.
The report lists trading in 61 bill instruments. That greater deal count suggests more frequent activity across bills, even though their combined volume was well below that of restructured bonds.
The largest bill volume was in a security maturing on March 29, 2027, which recorded GH¢209.04 million over three trades and a closing yield of 5.38%.
Other prominent volumes included GH¢92.95 million in a bill maturing in August 2027 and GH¢64.51 million in one maturing in July 2027.
Those individual observations show turnover in short-term government paper, but the report does not provide a comparison with earlier sessions to establish whether demand is strengthening or weakening.
The contrast between bills and DDEP bonds points to two different kinds of market activity. Bills drew many transactions across a broad set of securities; DDEP bonds generated much larger volumes through fewer trades, concentrated in several issues.
A healthy market needs both turnover and breadth. High volume in a limited set of instruments can support price discovery for those securities while leaving the rest of the curve less actively tested.
Corporate debt was a small part of the day’s trading. The GH¢11.48 million reported volume came from two instruments: a Ghana Cocoa Board bond, with GH¢11 million across two trades, and a Quantum bond, with GH¢476,004 in one trade. There was no reported activity in commercial paper or green and sustainable bonds.
That narrow showing should not be read as proof that companies cannot raise funds or that investors have no appetite for corporate paper. A daily trading report records secondary-market transactions, not all new borrowing or investor holdings.
But it does show how little corporate debt changed hands on this particular day. If Ghana wants businesses to rely more on long-term domestic finance, a deeper secondary market with more issuers, investors and regular trading will be important to make those instruments easier to price and trade.
The report also recorded GH¢77.57 million in separate sell/buy-back trades involving government bonds, across 22 transactions. The largest reported volumes were GH¢43.15 million in the 2029 DDEP bond and GH¢22.85 million in the 2032 bond.
Including these trades would lift the combined reported volume across the listed categories to about GH¢2.28 billion, but they are presented separately from outright transactions and should not be conflated with them.
For investors, the session offers evidence of activity, but not a simple verdict on confidence. The trading in DDEP bonds shows that investors are exchanging restructured government debt, while the bill market produced a much higher number of transactions.
The limited corporate-bond turnover highlights how government securities remain central to the market’s recorded trading.
For policymakers, the more difficult test is whether those flows can broaden. A market that depends on a few government bonds may appear active in headline volume while offering less choice and liquidity elsewhere.
More frequent trading across a wider range of maturities and issuers would improve price discovery and give institutions more options for managing risk.
Friday’s numbers therefore present a mixed picture: substantial reported volume, a busy Treasury-bill segment and strong concentration in a few DDEP bonds. They do not reveal what investors will do next, or whether the session represents a lasting shift.
They do, however, show that the next stage of Ghana’s fixed-income market will depend not just on how much trades, but on how widely that trading is shared. The source is the GFIM trading report for November 13, 2026.
