The Ghana cedi ended the first quarter of this year with a year-to-date appreciation of 0.6% against the dollar, similar to last year’s performance.

The strong performance made it the best currency among 15 important African countries, including the Egyptian pound, Nigerian naira and South African rand.

The Ghanaian local currency has benefited from growth in diversified exports, particularly gold and cocoa; the impact of covid-19 which has slowed down global economies and the Bank of Ghana’s forex interventions.

Senior Economic Analyst at Databank Research, Courage Martey, told Joy Business “the Ghana cedi ended the first quarter of 2021 with yet another impressive performance, similar to what it did in the first quarter of 2020. You will recall that in the first quarter of 2020, the local currency ended the quarter with an appreciation of almost 1.7% against the US dollar and that made it the second most resilient currency in our basket of 15 African currencies, only behind the Egyptian pound.”

“It is quite impressive, against the fact that the pandemic has not yet given way so there is still so much uncertainties within the global financial market space”, he said.

“Immense thanks to the Bank of Ghana’s intervention measures, particularly on the FX forward market but the significant inflows of foreign portfolio investments into the bond market especially during the course of this year has been significantly supportive of the Ghana cedi to put up the kind of performance we are seeing in the first quarter of 2021”, he emphasized.

2020 cedi performance

The cedi’s 2020 performance made it one of the best performing currencies in Sub Saharan Africa.

Its impressive performance also made it the best since 2017 when it depreciated by only 4.88%.

At the forex bureau, the rate of depreciation was even lower at 2.2%.

Quarter one performance of African best currencies to US dollar

Ghana cedi                                                         0.55%

Egyptian pound                                                0.18%

Nigerian naira                                                    0.00%

Tanzania shilling                                                0.00%

Kenya shilling                                                     -0.31%