First Deputy Governor of the Bank of Ghana (BoG), Dr. Zakari Mumuni, says commodities are emerging as critical levers for portfolio diversification, economic growth, and geopolitical influence and Ghana must sharpen its strategy to capture their full value.
Speaking at CNVERGE 2025, Africa’s premier trade banking thought-leadership event, on the theme “Leveraging Commodities: The Central Bank’s View”, Dr. Mumuni argued that in today’s volatile global economy, commodities are no longer mere exports, but strategic assets for building resilience, unlocking liquidity, and driving inclusive growth.
“The global economy has entered a new era, where commodities are not just exported, but strategically leveraged to build resilience, unlock liquidity, and drive inclusive growth,” he stated, adding that the BoG is committed to aligning with this global shift.
Citing Ghana’s gold sector, Dr. Mumuni noted that although Ghana became Africa’s largest gold producer in 2019 and the seventh globally, it did not add to its gold reserves that year, even as central banks worldwide purchased 670 tonnes of gold for reserve diversification. Gold contributed 56% of Ghana’s total export earnings, yet barely featured in the nation’s reserve portfolio until 2022.
To address this, the BoG launched the Domestic Gold Purchase Programme (DGPP) in June 2021, inspired by models in the Philippines, Ecuador, South Africa, Turkey, and Mongolia. The DGPP was designed to strengthen reserve accumulation while unlocking the wider economic potential of Ghana’s commodity base.
The DGPP also laid the foundation for the Gold for Oil (G4O) programme in 2022, which used gold-backed government-to-government arrangements to secure petroleum imports at competitive prices. The initiative eased pressure on Ghana’s foreign exchange market, stabilised ex-pump fuel prices, and helped contain inflationary pass-through effects.
In a bid to deepen market diversification, the BoG also introduced the Ghana Gold Coin (GGC) a high-purity, investment-grade asset serving as a store of value, an inflation hedge, and a monetary policy tool to manage excess liquidity.
According to Dr. Mumuni, the GGC opens “new avenues for wealth preservation and portfolio diversification for Ghanaians, particularly in times of economic uncertainty,” offering investors a tangible alternative asset in a period of global market turbulence.
With these measures, the BoG is signalling that Ghana’s future economic resilience may rest not only on traditional policy levers, but also on strategically harnessing the country’s commodity wealth from the mines to the monetary system.
