Ghana’s economic turnaround is generating impressive headline figures, but a development economist is warning that the numbers are masking a more troubling reality on the ground, where inequality continues to erode the real value of growth for small businesses, low-income households, and women-led enterprises.
Cindy Nortey, an Economic and Policy Research Fellow at the Policy Initiative for Economic Development (PIED Africa), made the assessment in a new economic review paper examining the distribution of Ghana’s recovery gains since the 2022 debt crisis.
She acknowledged that the macroeconomic picture had improved significantly. Inflation, which peaked at 54.1 percent in late 2022 and stood at 23.1 percent in early 2025, fell sharply to 3.3 percent in February 2026. The Ghana Reference Rate, the benchmark commercial banks use to price loans, has also been falling, and the Bank of Ghana (BoG) Governor has publicly committed to pushing average lending rates down to 10 percent before his tenure ends. The cedi is trading at approximately GH¢10.68 to the dollar, and the Monetary Policy Rate (MPR) currently stands at 15.5 percent.
Yet Ms Nortey argued that these gains had not reached a large portion of the population. “National development cannot be truly inclusive when growth bypasses those who need it most,” she said, warning that widening inequality risked undermining the credibility and sustainability of the recovery itself.
She pointed to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) as the clearest illustration of that disconnect. SMEs contribute approximately 70 percent of Ghana’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and employ up to 85 percent of the workforce, yet they bore the sharpest pain during the crisis years as high inflation drove up operating costs and forced many to cut jobs or shut down entirely. Women-owned businesses, which account for about 44 percent of micro, small, and medium enterprises, were disproportionately affected due to limited access to credit and collateral.
Across Sub-Saharan Africa, the SME financing gap stands at nearly $331 billion, with Ghana accounting for an estimated $4.8 billion of that shortfall. Ms Nortey noted that despite the improvement in monetary conditions, many financial institutions continued to prioritise short-term lending and demand high collateral, keeping capital out of reach for the businesses most critical to job creation.
Beyond finance, she flagged persistent structural gaps in employment, healthcare access, and income growth that the headline indicators did not capture. Unemployment remained stubborn despite improved growth figures, driven by a fast-expanding labour force, weak manufacturing output, and declining youth interest in agriculture. She said that while the Free Senior High School (FSHS) policy had broadened access to education, healthcare access remained uneven for low-income households.
The World Bank has noted that per capita GDP growth of one percent in Sub-Saharan Africa reduces the extreme poverty rate by only about one percent, compared to an average of 2.5 percent in the rest of the world, a gap that analysts attribute directly to structural inequality limiting the poverty-reducing power of growth.
Ms Nortey concluded that with only a few years remaining to meet the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Ghana’s policymakers needed to ensure that macroeconomic stability translated into stronger businesses, higher household incomes, and measurably better living standards.
