- Harvard Appoints Former BoG Governor Dr Ernest Addison for Research Fellowship and Student Seminars
Former Bank of Ghana Governor Dr Ernest Addison has been appointed a Short-Term Senior Research Fellow with Harvard University’s Center for International Development and Center for African Studies, giving him a platform to reflect on one of the most turbulent periods in Ghana’s recent economic history.
As part of the fellowship, Dr Addison is expected to lead four CID student seminar sessions in October examining his eight-year tenure as Governor of the Bank of Ghana, including the financial-sector clean-up, Ghana’s pre-pandemic growth period, the economic shocks triggered by Covid-19 and the Russia-Ukraine war, and the country’s subsequent debt and foreign-exchange crisis.
Dr Addison retired from the Bank of Ghana in March 2025 after serving as Governor for eight years. His tenure spanned a period of unusually severe global and domestic economic disruption, moving from an era of abundant international liquidity and historically low global interest rates into the pandemic, geopolitical shocks, tightening global financial conditions and Ghana’s eventual loss of access to international capital markets.
The Harvard sessions are expected to offer students a first-hand account of how monetary authorities responded as those conditions changed.
The programme will examine not only the policies that supported Ghana’s earlier growth performance but also the decisions taken when the economy moved into crisis and ultimately returned to an International Monetary Fund-supported programme.
A major part of the discussions will focus on the financial-sector reforms undertaken during the first half of Dr Addison’s tenure. Ghana embarked on an extensive clean-up that resulted in the resolution of nine banks and 347 other financial institutions, while the Bank of Ghana strengthened supervisory capacity and introduced a Basel III-based capital requirements framework.
Those reforms were among the most consequential and politically sensitive financial-sector interventions undertaken in Ghana in decades. Their stated objective was to address undercapitalisation and weaknesses within parts of the banking and specialised deposit-taking industry while strengthening institutions sufficiently to withstand future shocks.
By the time the Covid-19 pandemic struck, Ghana’s banking system had emerged with stronger capital buffers following the restructuring exercise.
The economic environment before the pandemic had also been characterised by relatively strong growth and declining inflation, while Ghana retained access to international capital markets during a period of abundant global liquidity.
Dr Addison was named Sub-Saharan Africa Central Bank Governor of the Year by Global Markets during that period, with the recognition highlighting measures undertaken by the central bank and reforms to the financial system.
Those achievements are expected to form part of the first phase of his Harvard discussions, alongside the relationship between monetary policy, financial stability and Ghana’s international credit standing.
The second half of his tenure presented a very different policy landscape. Ghana’s fiscal position weakened as public debt increased, while deteriorating creditworthiness and increasingly difficult international financing conditions eventually shut the country out of global capital markets, intensifying domestic liquidity and debt pressures.
The resulting crisis forced Ghana to pursue extensive corrective measures, including domestic and external debt restructuring and a return to an IMF-supported economic programme. For the central bank, the episode raised difficult questions around monetary financing, inflation, financial stability, foreign-exchange management and how to preserve the banking system while government debt held by financial institutions was being restructured.
One of Dr Addison’s planned sessions will focus specifically on an economy in crisis, examining its manifestations, the role played by the central bank and the policy choices associated with Ghana’s return to the IMF. The seminars are also expected to consider the front-loading of corrective measures during 2023 and 2024 as policymakers attempted to restore macroeconomic stability.
Another area of focus will be the Bank of Ghana’s Domestic Gold Purchase Programme, which became an important component of efforts to accumulate foreign-exchange buffers without relying exclusively on traditional reserve purchases financed through external inflows. The programme increased the role of domestically produced gold in the central bank’s reserve-management strategy at a time when Ghana’s access to international capital was severely constrained.
The sessions are expected to examine how those reserve buffers interacted with Ghana’s eventual foreign-exchange performance and the assumptions underpinning the country’s debt sustainability framework. The period subsequently saw a marked appreciation of the cedi and faster movement towards some of the debt-sustainability thresholds associated with Ghana’s IMF-supported adjustment programme.
For Harvard students, the value of the fellowship lies partly in the unusual breadth of economic conditions covered by Dr Addison’s tenure. Few central-bank administrations move within eight years from strong growth and international capital-market access through a global pandemic, geopolitical commodity shocks, sovereign debt distress, domestic debt restructuring and an IMF-backed stabilisation programme.
The seminars will therefore provide a case study not simply of central banking under normal conditions but of policymaking when conventional assumptions are repeatedly disrupted. They will also offer an opportunity to examine the sometimes difficult boundary between monetary and fiscal policy when a sovereign faces severe financing constraints.
Dr Addison’s Harvard appointment consequently places Ghana’s recent economic experience within a wider international policy discussion. His eight years at the Bank of Ghana offer lessons both from the period when reforms and favourable external conditions supported growth and from the far more difficult period when policymakers had to manage debt distress, inflation, currency pressure and the rebuilding of macroeconomic buffers.
For Ghana, those experiences remain part of an unfinished debate over the causes of the crisis, the choices made during it and the sustainability of the subsequent recovery. At Harvard, Dr Addison will now have the opportunity to examine those decisions from the perspective of the central banker who was at the centre of them.
