Ghana’s economy will experience a buoyant growth this year with an expected growth rate of 4.8% as services and industry recover sharply, according to Fitch Solutions, research arm of rating agency, Fitch.

The growth rate is almost in line with Moody’s 4.0% projection but in sharp contrast to World Bank’s 1.4%.

It will also be higher than the ECOWAS sub regional growth of 3.6% and Sub-Saharan Africa growth of 3.3%.

In its latest Sub Saharan Outlook Report, Senior Country Risk Analyst in the Sub-Saharan Africa team at Fitch Solutions, William Atwell, said a boost in demand for goods and services as well as consumer spending will drive the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), that is total value of goods and services produced within a period, this year.

“I mentioned in the presentation our real GDP growth expectations for 2021; we expect the Ghanaian economy to grow around 4.8%. For 2008, we think the economy slowdown to 1.8%.”

Mr. Atwell further said “Ghana of course experienced a technical recession in the middle part of last year-two consecutive quarters of contraction- Q2 [Quarter 3] understandably been the deeper of the two contractions, Q3 [Quarter 3] relatively shallow contraction. And the data that we’ve seen from the final month of the year [2020] suggests that economic activity accelerated towards the end of the year, so we expect that Ghana exited the recession towards the end of last year.”

“Looking ahead to this year we are expecting pretty strong consumer and business spending”, he added.

East & Central Africa and West Africa will be SSA’s main growth drivers, expanding by 3.9% and 3.6%, respectively, versus respective contractions of 1.1% and 2.1% in 2020, with notable outperformance in key markets such as Kenya (growth of 4.4%), Côte d'Ivoire (6.6%) and Ghana (4.8%).

Economy contracted in Quarter 3

Ghana’s economy entered into recession in the third (-1.1%) of 2020.

The Agriculture sector however recorded the highest growth of 8.3%, whilst Industry and Services sectors contracted by 5.1% and 1.1% respectively.