Government says it is racing against time in securing a concrete deal with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) before the 2023 Budget is read in November, 2022.

A delegation from the IMF will be in town from Monday, September 26 to commence official negotiations with Ghana for an economic programme to help restructure the imbalance in the Ghanaian economy.

The team is expected to stay in the country for the next two weeks.  

Finance Minister, Ken Ofori Atta, speaking at a signing of a Memorandum of Understanding with some local banks for the YouStart progarmme, said it is crucial for the country to get an arrangement from the Fund before the 2023 Budget presentation in Parliament.

“We have the Fund visiting from 26th to 7th October, 2022 to begin some negotiations and then we go to the Annual General Meetings in Washington [USA] and continue with that and come back.”

“As you know the President [Nana Akufo-Addo] wants this negotiation to be done within a period before the budget. And the budget to be done by November 15, 2022…maybe”, Mr. Ofori-Atta pointed out.

To him, the negotiation is critical since it took Zambia two years before an economic programme was agreed with the IMF.

“It’s really a crunch time. Zambia took two years, and so we want to do it differently. I think we are determined to do that and we need as a nation to know beyond the murmuring and understand we can do that’.