Ghana’s central bank pumped nearly $13bn into FX market in just a year to save local currency, IMF says

The International Monetary Fund has disclosed that the Bank of Ghana sold $12.9 billion on the foreign exchange market in the year to end-May 2026, about $1.1 billion a month, laying bare the scale of an intervention that has propped up the cedi even as the currency slips again this year. In its report accompanying the sixth and final review of Ghana’s $3 billion Extended Credit Facility, the Fund said the central bank “accumulated $3.9 billion and sold $12.9 billion in FX in the 12 months through end-May 2026,” while rebuilding reserves beyond programme targets. Ghana’s international reserves reached nearly 6 months of import cover at the end of 2025, and the cedi appreciated 40.7% in nominal effective terms over the year, one of the strongest currency performances in the region.

However, despite the scale of the dollar sales, the cedi has come under renewed pressure in 2026. It depreciated about 10% against the dollar in the first seven months of the year, weakening from about GH¢10.95 in January to about GH¢11.7 by end of July, according to Bank of Ghana data. The IMF flagged a governance concern in how the intervention was carried out.

While a new FX operations framework introduced in November 2025 had improved transparency, the Fund said “auctions have frequently deviated from published guidelines by rejecting the highest bids.” The scale of the dollar sales comes as Ghana leans heavily on gold to rebuild its external buffers, a strategy that has carried a steep cost. The central bank’s Domestic Gold Purchase Programme, run in tandem with the state-owned Ghana Gold Board, “has generated losses of GHS 22 billion (1.5 percent of GDP) in 2025,” the report said. Those losses, the Fund said, “coupled with higher costs of open-market operations and exchange rate valuation losses” from the appreciating cedi, “worsened the BoG’s negative equity position to 6.7 percent of GDP at end-2025.” In February 2026, parliament adopted the Ghana Accelerated National Reserve Accumulation Policy, which sets a target of 15 months of import cover by 2028, to be met through increased domestic gold purchases.

The IMF pushed back, saying reserves of that size “would not be advisable on precautionary grounds alone, given the non-negligible costs.” It noted that sterilisation costs already reached 1% of GDP in 2025 and would rise with further accumulation. The Bank of Ghana’s domestic gold-buying scheme run in tandem with the state-owned Ghana Gold Board racked up losses of GH¢22 billion, equivalent to 1.5% of gross domestic product, in a single year, the International Monetary Fund said, a figure far larger than earlier estimates that had already stirred political controversy. In its latest report accompanying the sixth and final review of Ghana’s $3 billion Extended Credit Facility, the Fund said the Domestic Gold Purchase Programme (DGPP), on which the central bank had relied to accumulate reserves and channel foreign exchange to the private sector, generated losses of GH¢22 billion, or 1.5% of GDP, in 2025.

The disclosure sharpens a debate that has run for months over who should bear the cost of Ghana’s flagship gold strategy, and marks a steep escalation from the $214 million loss the IMF first flagged in December for the nine months to end-September 2025. The $214 million figure, disclosed in the Fund’s fifth review, covered only trading losses on artisanal and small-scale doré gold transactions plus GoldBod off-taker fees through the third quarter of 2025, and was put at roughly 0.2% of GDP. The Bank of Ghana disputed that number at the time, and the scale of the losses continued to climb as the central bank closed its books on the year.

The gross loss on the doré gold trade with GoldBod ultimately reached the GH¢22 billion cited by the Fund, about $2 billion at prevailing rates, before offsets from a government intervention and gains on bullion sales reduced the net hit reported in the central bank’s audited accounts. The programme’s damage did not stop at the trading losses. The IMF said the DGPP losses, coupled with higher costs of open-market operations and exchange rate valuation losses from a sharply appreciating cedi, pushed the Bank of Ghana’s equity position deeper into negative territory, to minus 6.7% of GDP at the end of 2025.