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 renewed currency weakness raises the risk of higher pump prices, since fuel is imported and priced off the exchange rate, at a time when global oil markets are unsettled by conflict in the Middle East. The IMF itself cautioned the central bank to proceed carefully with rate cuts, citing "potential second-round effects from the impact of the war in the Middle East on energy and fertilizer prices" and "persistent risks from the high exchange rate pass-through." Brent crude climbed sharply through the early part of the year, adding to the import bill.

The gold losses had direct consequences for Ghana's IMF programme. A government cost-sharing agreement at the end of 2025, involving the transfer of bonds with a face value of GH¢5 billion in March 2026, breached a ceiling on central bank claims on the government, a performance criterion under the loan programme, at end-December 2025 and again at end-March 2026. Authorities requested, and Fund staff supported, a waiver for the missed target.

As a corrective step, the Bank of Ghana, GoldBod and the government signed a memorandum of understanding in July formalising the transfer of the gold programme from the central bank to GoldBod and eliminating the related quasi-fiscal activities. Doré gold purchases have been conducted by GoldBod since April 1, and from July 1 the government assumed all of the programme's costs, replacing the central bank.

The central bank has meanwhile begun reshaping its reserves, cutting the share of monetary gold in gross international reserves "from about one-third to under one-fifth" in the fourth quarter of 2025 and selling half of its gold holdings to improve the portfolio's risk profile.

The IMF said the central bank should gradually reduce its footprint in the FX market, relax net open position limits and remove remaining capital flow measures to deepen the interbank market and improve price discovery. It also noted that Ghana continues to maintain several multiple currency practices that distort the market, and urged a clear, time-bound plan to eliminate them.

The Bank of Ghana has cut its policy rate by 1,400 basis points since July 2025, one of the highest among its peers in Africa bringing it to 14% and a broadly neutral stance, as inflation continue to remain within target of 8% plus or minus 2.