Ghana’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is actively engaging market operators to develop the financial tools and institutional frameworks needed to convert the country’s record diaspora remittances into productive capital market investment, with the Commission’s Deputy Director-General for Finance, Mensah Thompson, warning that an entire class of willing investors is being left out of Ghana’s growth story for want of accessible channels.
Thompson, speaking to market participants, disclosed that the impetus for the SEC’s current push came from direct engagements with Ghana’s ambassadors in the United Kingdom and the United States.
Those engagements, he said, revealed a level of diaspora investment appetite that the domestic market has not yet been structured to absorb.
Ghanaians abroad have expressed a clear willingness to pool resources for infrastructure investment back home, citing the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, a project partly financed through diaspora bond contributions, as a model they would be prepared to replicate.
The message from the diaspora, according to Thompson, is straightforward: if the government can identify “a particular feasible infrastructure project, which is income generating” and provide clarity on repayment timelines, the capital is ready and investors are “willing to mobilise” in Ghana’s direction.
The observation, he said, crystallised a structural gap that the SEC is now working to close.
There is, Thompson argued, “a lot of interest in the diaspora to invest back home,” but that interest is being constrained by the absence of the instruments, information pathways, and institutional frameworks needed to provide a formal and trusted outlet for such investments.
The Commission’s engagement with what he described as “market makers”, brokers, investment firms, and intermediaries operating between capital and opportunity, is focused on assessing how those channels can be developed and how diaspora capital can be encouraged to “float in to invest in Ghana” rather than remaining concentrated in remittances or foreign financial products.
The scale of what is at stake sharpens the urgency of the effort.
Ghana received approximately US$8 billion in remittances last year, and Thompson was pointed about what even a partial redirection of those flows could mean for the country’s capital market.
“If out of this 8 billion, 4 billion is finding its way to the capital market,” he said, “it’s huge.”
Such a shift would fundamentally alter the depth, liquidity, and development financing capacity of Ghana’s securities market while providing an alternative source of long-term capital for infrastructure and enterprise development.
The observation aligns with the Bank of Ghana’s Remit2Invest initiative, which Thompson acknowledged is gaining momentum as part of a broader national effort to redirect remittance flows from consumption toward productive investment.
The SEC’s involvement adds a market development dimension to what has largely been a central bank and macroeconomic conversation.
As Thompson noted, developing the market is “part of our mandate,” and creating a functional diaspora investment architecture is not a peripheral ambition but a core regulatory responsibility.
The frameworks under discussion include investment vehicles capable of providing diaspora contributors with transparency on project selection, income-generation potential, governance arrangements, and expected return timelines, the precise elements that Ghanaians abroad have indicated would give them the confidence to commit capital at scale.
The clearest takeaway from the SEC’s engagement is that Ghana is moving beyond simply recognising the financial contribution of its diaspora toward a more deliberate effort to mobilise those resources through formal investment structures.
