IERPP demands accountability as BoG’s negative equity hits 6.7% of GDP

The Institute of Economic Research and Public Policy (IERPP) has reviewed the International Monetary Fund’s July 2026 Selected Issues paper on Ghana (IMF Country Report No. 26/213) and is alarmed by what some of the content of the report.

The Bank of Ghana’s Domestic Gold Purchase Programme (DGPP), the scheme now folded into the Ghana Gold Board (GoldBod), lost US$1.7 billion, or 1.5 percent of Ghana’s GDP, in 2025 alone.

That is 17 cents lost for every dollar of doré gold the state sold on the international market.

This is not a rounding error. It is money that belonged to the Ghanaian people, generated from Ghanaian gold, and it disappeared into fees, discounts to exporters, and, overwhelmingly, the exchange-rate spread between what the state paid to buy gold and what it recorded on its own books.

THE NUMBERS THE IMF CONFIRMS

• 2024 losses: US$400 million (0.5% of GDP)
• 2025 losses: US$1.7 billion (1.5% of GDP), more than a four-fold increase in a single year
• Losses were “almost entirely related to G4R doré purchases”, the channel through which the state buys gold from small-scale and artisanal miners
• The cost of running the programme stood at 14.5 percent of the value of gold purchased in 2025, nearly three times the 5 percent ceiling the government itself says is acceptable.
• The Bank of Ghana’s shareholders’ equity collapsed from +GH₵6.2 billion at the end of 2021 to -GH₵93.8 billion at the end of 2025, a negative position equal to 6.7 percent of GDP

WHO IS RESPONSIBLE? THE HONEST ANSWER

IERPP will not pretend this problem was invented by the current administration. The DGPP was launched in 2021 under the previous NPP government, at the height of Ghana’s debt crisis, as an emergency tool to rebuild reserves and secure fuel imports when the country had lost access to international capital markets.

That origin is a matter of record, and IERPP has said so consistently.

But the IMF’s own data draws a hard line between then and now.

The programme’s massive scale-up, the point at which it went from a modest reserve-building tool to becoming, in the Fund’s words, the intermediary in “virtually all ASGM gold exports”, happened from 2024 into 2025, and the entirety of the $1.7 billion loss reported for 2025 was incurred under the current NDC administration.

Losses did not shrink as the country’s macroeconomic position stabilized, they quadrupled.

A government that inherited a wartime tool kept it running at wartime scale long after the emergency that justified it had passed, and the bill for that choice is $1.7 billion.

IERPP also notes that it took until November 2025, eleven months into this administration, and only with direct IMF technical assistance, for the Bank of Ghana to even adopt a transparent, pre-announced FX auction framework.

For most of 2025, the losses accumulated under the old, less transparent, ad hoc system.

THE RISK AHEAD IS BIGGER, NOT SMALLER

This is where IERPP’s concern turns from the past to the future. Under the government’s own Ghana Accelerated National Reserve Accumulation Policy (GANRAP), the authorities plan to double the volume of large-scale mine gold purchased by the state and push reserves to 15 months of import cover by 2028, more than double the six months the IMF itself assesses as adequate.

The Fund’s own estimate is that sterilising reserves at that scale will cost roughly 3 percent of GDP, up from 1 percent in 2025.

In plain terms: government is proposing to expand a programme that just lost $1.7 billion to a scale the IMF has not endorsed as necessary, at triple the sterilisation cost. Ghanaians deserve to know why.

IERPP’S DEMANDS

1. A full public accounting of the 2025 DGPP losses, broken down by fee, discount, and exchange-rate component, published by the Bank of Ghana and Ministry of Finance, not left to an IMF staff paper to surface eight months later.
2. Parliamentary scrutiny of the GANRAP reserve target and its projected sterilisation costs before any further scale-up of domestic gold purchases proceeds.
3. An independent value-for-money audit of GoldBod’s assumption of the DGPP, to confirm the promised reduction in operating costs to 5 percent of gold purchased is actually delivered and not simply relabelled.
4. Quarterly public disclosure of the spread between the forex bureau rate and the Bank of Ghana’s reference rate, given that this spread is now identified as the single largest driver of losses.
5. A clear timeline and funding commitment from government for the “transparent” absorption of DGPP costs it has promised, given the Bank of Ghana can no longer absorb losses of this size without further eroding its already deeply negative equity position.

Conclusion

Ghana’s gold wealth should be building the country’s reserves, not funding avoidable losses on gold Ghana already produces. IERPP will continue to track this issue and expects government to respond with data, not dismissal.

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