- The Cedi Reset Ghana Couldn’t Postpone: Industry Wants the Bank of Ghana to Stay the Course
By the end of 2025, Ghana’s currency story had flipped from panic to planning. The cedi, which had become a shorthand for crisis in 2022–2023, was once again behaving like a currency businesses could price with. For the private sector, that change was not cosmetic: it was the difference between committing capital and freezing it.
Seth Twum Akwaboah, Chief Executive of the Association of Ghana Industries (AGI), put it bluntly: Ghana “needed cedi stability so badly, no matter the cost,” after a period when confidence had collapsed and even businesses investing their own resources “became an issue.”
Across the economy, the logic is simple. Ghana imports a large share of what it consumes and produces fuel, machinery, spare parts and many industrial inputs. When the cedi swings, prices swing. That volatility quickly becomes inflation, and inflation becomes uncertainty. The first job of stabilisation, in that sense, is to stop the economy from repricing itself every week.
At Channel One TV’s Quarterly Economic Outlook forum, that theme surfaced again and again: stabilisation has restored predictability, but the country now needs to protect it, deepen it, and translate it into cheaper credit and production growth.
The macro turnaround is not only a perception story. In the forum’s summary of the recovery arc, inflation is described as having fallen sharply from the 2022 peak with further moderation into early 2026 while the cedi appreciated strongly and reserves climbed to a record level by February 2026.
That same narrative is echoed in Ghana’s IMF programme documentation, which notes that reserves accumulation outperformed targets, the cedi appreciated, and the external position strengthened as reforms gained traction through 2025.
In market terms, the Bank of Ghana’s credibility has increasingly rested on one promise: that disinflation and currency stability will be defended not by slogans but by policy consistency, coordinated fiscal restraint, cleaner FX management, and enough reserves to deter speculation.
Private sector feedback has been unusually direct: the cedi’s calm has reduced the incentive to hoard dollars and has brought “real market players” back into the system.
Mr Akwaboah argues that part of the improvement has been the reduction of speculative pressure that once fed hoarding behaviour and widened spreads in the parallel market. The point is not theoretical. When traders and manufacturers believe depreciation is inevitable, they price ahead of it. That behaviour itself becomes inflation.
From the trading community, Joseph Paddy of GUTA captured the lived experience: at the height of the crisis, traders were buying dollars at around GH¢17; by late 2024 and early 2025 but going into the end of 2025, it was closer to GH¢11 and, he said, “the stability has curbed speculation.” This is exactly the channel through which currency management becomes business confidence.
GUTA has also publicly credited the central bank for stabilising the cedi and urged that the gains be sustained, a signal that the policy direction is being noticed outside boardrooms.
When it comes to Mark Badu Aboagye, Chief Executive of the Ghana National Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GNCCI), he pointed to the practical payoff: imported goods are becoming cheaper as the cedi strengthens, and import price inflation has shifted from slightly positive into negative territory. The caveat, he noted, is that locally produced items still face higher inflation a reminder that currency stability helps, but structural production constraints remain.
Even the informal economy often excluded from macro conversations is reading the change in a simple way: stable currency means stable pricing. Mercy Naa Afrowa Needjan of the Greater Accra Markets Association said: “The cedi is stable and we are happy… We are grateful,” after earlier periods when prices changed frequently amid scarcity and speculative spikes.
The private sector’s message now is: keep the currency stable but convert stability into growth conditions.
Mr. Akwaboah’s concern is that manufacturing continues to receive the least credit relative to services and import-trade segments, even as confidence returns. GNCCI’s Aboagye warns that despite falling inflation, the real cost of borrowing remains high, and he points to the BoG Governor’s stated ambition to push lending rates below 10 per cent as a key accountability marker. That ambition has also been widely reported publicly. For now, industry is sending the Bank a rare compliment in Ghanaian macroeconomics: the hardest part was restoring belief. The next hardest part is proving that belief can last.
