Ghana's central bank just dumped roughly $10 billion into the forex market in 2025—ten times what it sold in 2023 and nearly four times last year's $3 billion. October alone saw up to $1.3 billion fly out the door, one of the biggest single-month operations on record. The cedi responded exactly as you'd expect when someone floods the market with dollars: it jumped 13.9% that month and clocked a 32.2% year-to-date gain by October.
Ghana flooded the market with $10 billion in forex—and the cedi surged 32% as dollars poured in.
But here's where it gets interesting. The Bank of Ghana swears this isn't some desperate defense of an exchange-rate peg. They call it “FX intermediation and liquidity support,” wrapped in a shiny new Foreign Exchange Operations Framework developed—conveniently—in consultation with the IMF. The framework promises competitive auctions, rule-based criteria, and interventions only during liquidity gaps or market dysfunction. “Structured discretion-under-constraint,” they call it. Sounds fancy.
Monthly auction volumes tapered from $1.3 billion in October to $1 billion in November and $800 million by early December. The auctions targeted banks and key corporates scrambling for dollars, easing shortages for importers and crushing parallel-market premiums. Market watchers admit the supply-demand shift indirectly propped up the cedi, even if officials insist they're just facilitating payments. Understanding the exchange rate dynamics between the dollar and cedi is crucial for forex traders navigating this volatile market.
Now for the money shot: where did $10 billion come from? Gold. Massive gold windfalls from the Domestic Gold Purchase Programme, turbocharged by gold prices screaming past $4,000 an ounce in early October. Those revenues flowed into FX buffers and reserve buildup.
Gross international reserves climbed from $9.1 billion in December 2024 to $11.4 billion by October 2025, despite the torrent of dollar sales. Analysts expect reserves to close 2025 above $12 billion. Authorities insist there's no net reserve depletion—just parallel accumulation from gold and programme inflows. With forex transactions operating on a T+2 settlement basis, the actual exchange of currencies occurred two business days after each auction's trade execution date.
Part of the $10 billion settled obligations to Independent Power Producers in foreign currency, while another chunk went to bondholder repayments and external debt servicing. Dividend and profit repatriation got smoothed out too. The central bank's regulatory functions extend beyond direct market intervention to include oversight of commercial banks' foreign exchange positions and compliance with prudential limits. Bold liquidity support or a risky bet banking on gold staying sky-high? The cedi's riding high for now. Whether that lasts depends on gold prices—and luck.
