Dear Editor Your report, “IMF praises Ghana’s economic recovery but warns over energy and debt risks” (May 15, 2026), rightly captures a real turnaround: inflation has fallen sharply, reserves have been rebuilt and confidence in the cedi has improved.
For many Ghanaians, this is not abstract economics.
We remember when the cedi sank past 16 to the dollar in late 2024.
To see it near 12 today is genuine relief for households and businesses after months of painful uncertainty.
But we must not mistake stabilisation for transformation.
A stronger cedi is not the same as a stronger economy.
Much of today’s improvement rests on tight policy and a gold windfall: gold export earnings reached about US$20 billion in 2025, far outpacing cocoa and oil.
Yet, gold earns foreign exchange while employing relatively few people.
Our own Statistical Service finds these gains concentrated in extractives not broad-based jobs, with manufacturing’s output far outpacing its employment.
A currency can strengthen while the farms, factories and workshops that create jobs stay weak.
The government now says as much.
The 2026 mid-year review is themed “Resetting for Growth, Jobs, and Economic Transformation” and promises to turn stability into productivity and jobs.
The right words are there; what matters now is whether the money follows them.
For the real test is productivity: the value each worker and firm produces over time.
As the Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman observed, productivity is not everything, but in the long run, it is almost everything. Inflation can fall and the cedi can rise, but living standards will not improve unless Ghana produces more per worker.
None of it will hold, either, while the power sector keeps running up debts the state must repeatedly clear.
We need not look far for a model.
According to the UN’s Global Innovation Index, Vietnam, a fellow lower-middle-income economy, now ranks second only to India among innovators in its income group, having drawn foreign investment into export-focused factories, from electronics to garments and into global supply chains.
Ghana is already moving this way, scrapping excise on locally made fruit juices, zero-rating local textiles and backing farming through the 24-Hour Economy and Farmers’ Service Centres.
Yet, these lean on tight budget money and hoped-for private investment, while the one large pot, the gold windfall, sits in reserves.
Affordable, long-term credit has always been the missing ingredient, given the high interest rates Ghanaian businesses have long faced.
So once reserves are comfortably rebuilt, Ghana should channel a fixed share of the windfall, now accumulating under the Ghana Accelerated National Reserve Accumulation Policy (GANRAP), into cheap, long-term finance for the agricultural value chain: the storage, processing and market links that turn raw crops into higher-value goods and broad-based jobs.
That is the difference between announcing transformation and funding it.
The new cocoa reforms, too, will be judged less by the strength of the law than by how they are implemented.
Let us judge this recovery not only at the forex bureau, but in our factories, farms, ports, classrooms and small businesses.
The IMF programme may have helped stabilise the patient; the next job is to build economic muscle.
Melissa Akita
MBA 2025
Co-Chair, Cambridge Africa Business Conference
Cambridge Judge Business School | University of Cambridge
Trumpington Street | Cambridge CB2 1AG | United Kingdom
