Governor of the Bank of Ghana (BoG), Dr Johnson Asiama, has called for a bold national shift from exporting raw materials to adding value to Ghana’s key natural resources.

He says the country must process more of its gold, oil, and cocoa if it hopes to reduce economic vulnerabilities and strengthen long-term stability.

Speaking in Washington DC on the sidelines of the IMF/World Bank Spring Meetings, Dr Asiama said Ghana’s export basket remains dominated by primary commodities, exposing the economy to external shocks and price fluctuations.

“We have a mixture of exports. There’s gold, but then there’s also cocoa. Cocoa is doing well. And then the remittances, we have other non-traditional exports as well,” he said.

“So several of them, however, given that they are all commodities, primary commodities, essentially, there’s the challenge that we have to do more and more processing.”

Dr Asiama stressed that sustained growth cannot come from exporting unprocessed resources.

He urged a deliberate focus on value addition across the three key export fronts — gold, oil, and cocoa — to strengthen Ghana’s economic resilience.

“I sense that if we can do greater processing on three fronts - gold, oil and cocoa - that will reduce the vulnerabilities that we hold as a country, and I believe that the government is working hard on that,” he said.

The Governor highlighted ongoing efforts to revive and expand domestic refining capacity for gold.

He said Ghana already has a few gold refineries ready to begin processing part of the country’s output to ensure that not all of it is exported in its raw form.

“There is talk about reviving some of the refineries...We have a couple of gold refineries currently in town. They are just about to start refining part of the gold so that we don’t have to export the entire dore gold,” he noted.

“Some processing can take place in the country for value addition, so we can reduce our vulnerabilities, going forward.”