Ghana does not have to choose between building its foreign exchange reserves and creating jobs but it must sequence its policies carefully to achieve both, a United States-based finance professor has argued, pushing back against critics who frame the Ghana Accelerated National Reserve Accumulation Policy (GANRAP) as a zero-sum contest between macroeconomic prudence and immediate welfare.
Professor Williams Kwasi Peprah of Andrews University in Michigan told The High Street Journal that the debate is more nuanced than the either-or framing that has dominated public commentary since Finance Minister Dr. Cassiel Ato Forson presented GANRAP to Parliament on February 25, 2026, targeting reserves equivalent to 15 months of import cover by 2028. Ghana currently holds gross international reserves of US$13.8 billion, equivalent to 5.7 months of import cover, up from 4.0 months in 2024.
The core tension critics raise is straightforward: every cedi directed toward reserve accumulation is a cedi not spent on job creation, infrastructure, or poverty reduction. In a country where youth unemployment and cost-of-living pressures remain acute, the argument goes, macroeconomic buffers are a luxury that policymakers cannot afford to prioritise over immediate welfare.
Prof. Peprah concedes the point has merit under one condition. “If reserves are accumulated at the expense of essential public investment or social protection, the short-term welfare losses are real, and critics have a strong case,” he told The High Street Journal. In that scenario, the policy mix would be poorly calibrated and public frustration would be justified.
But he does not accept that this outcome is inevitable. His central argument is that jobs and reserves address different time horizons rather than competing for the same resources. Direct employment spending and poverty-reduction programmes deliver immediate welfare gains. Reserve accumulation, by contrast, provides macro-stability insurance that protects those same gains from being wiped out by currency collapses, sudden capital outflows, or import shortages. “Jobs and direct poverty-reducing spending produce immediate welfare gains; reserves produce macro-stability that can protect jobs and growth indirectly,” he said.
The solution, in his view, is intelligent sequencing rather than a choice between extremes. He suggests separating stabilisation funds from the general budget, setting transparent governance rules for how reserve assets are managed, maintaining prudent borrowing levels, and protecting essential social programmes throughout the accumulation period. “If reserves are built while maintaining prudent fiscal space and clear rules, then reserves can be a legitimate macro-insurance priority that supports sustainable job creation over the medium term,” Prof. Peprah said.
GANRAP’s design contains elements that address exactly this sequencing concern. Rather than accumulating reserves through costly external borrowing, the policy is anchored on the Ghana Gold Board Act of 2025, with an operational weekly gold purchase target of approximately 3.02 tonnes drawn primarily from the artisanal small-scale mining sector and pre-emption rights over large-scale mine output. In 2025, the Ghana Gold Board generated approximately US$10 billion in foreign exchange at a cost of only US$214 million, compared to US$1.16 billion in interest paid on US$5.65 billion in swap-based reserves accumulated between 2022 and 2024.
That cost differential matters for the jobs debate. When reserves are accumulated through domestic gold mobilisation rather than external debt, the fiscal space freed from debt servicing can, in principle, be redeployed toward employment and social spending. The implicit social cost of reserve accumulation falls when the accumulation mechanism is low-cost.
Prof. Peprah frames the broader GANRAP debate as a development challenge familiar to most emerging economies: how to balance immediate needs with long-term resilience without sacrificing one to secure the other. Ghana’s record on this balance is mixed. Between 2018 and 2021, Ghana borrowed via Eurobonds to build reserves at coupon rates of between 7.6 and 9.6 percent, generating cumulative interest costs of roughly US$2.5 billion, a burden that contributed directly to the 2022 debt distress. GANRAP represents a structural break from that approach.
Whether the new framework delivers on both its reserve and welfare dimensions will depend on the fiscal discipline, governance transparency, and policy consistency that Prof. Peprah identifies as the conditions under which reserves and jobs reinforce rather than undermine each other.
