Food items including imported rice and smoked herrings, fares and local transit commercial vehicles aka ‘trotro’ are key drivers of Consumer Price Inflation, the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) has said. 

In a retrospective analysis, the GSS said it had identified items in the inflation basket that had been driving inflation since the Consumer Price Index (CPI) was rebased in 2018.

The 15 items identified have appeared consistently as top-ranked items between 2018 and 2024.

Simon Tichutab Onilimor, Data Scientist, GSS, said 13 of the 15 selected items happened to be food items and the non-food items were fuel and fares of buses and trotro vehicles.

He said this during stakeholders' engagement on the Consumer Price Inflation Review which was organised by the Ghana Statistical Service to foster a collaborative dialogue among key stakeholders. 

The meeting highlighted the importance of understanding the multifaceted factors contributing to consumer price inflation and generated discussions on the development of comprehensive strategies to address them. 

Mr Tichutab Onilimor said: “All we did is to monitor the growth rate of inflation and its trends, how previous CPI can influence inflation for 2025 and highlighting what the possibilities could be for the year. We realised that bus and trotro fares ranked in the top 15 for about 70 times of the 72 data points we have.”

He said the food items to look out for in the fight against inflation are imported rice, beef, bread, yam, fresh tomatoes, cooked rice with stew, kenkey with fish, fried plantain with beans, smoked river fish, smoked herrings, local gin, sea fish and large onions.

He called for an urgent look at the country’s food basket for a broader stakeholder consultation to see how ministries that contribute to food production get involved in ensuring food price monitoring to help drive down inflation.

“We need to know if we are producing enough and what exactly we are producing, what is the gap between the farm gates and the market prices. What happens in transporting these food items from the farms to the market,” the Data Scientist said. 

The Ghana Statistical Service in a statement, said, the retrospective approach was important because Consumer Price Inflation recorded changes over time in prices and the inflation rates from previous periods (base effect) influenced the current figures. 

“This necessitates a critical review of 2024 consumer price indices as one of the factors to be considered in the computation of annual rate of inflation in 2025,” it said. 

The Statement also said that the retrospective analysis indicated that specific items consistently recorded the highest price changes…and the items consistently recording the highest price changes constitute almost a third of average household expenditure. 

“Median prices also increased substantially over the period for transportation services and staple food items such as large onions, smoked herrings, sea fish, kenkey with fish, imported rice and fresh tomatoes,” it said.