Ghana’s central bank is no longer supposed to sit behind the country’s artisanal gold-buying machine. In July 2026 the Bank of Ghana, the Ghana Gold Board and the government signed a memorandum of understanding that transferred the Domestic Gold Purchase Programme to GoldBod. The International Monetary Fund treated that handover as a prior action for completing Ghana’s sixth and final Extended Credit Facility review.
The reason sits in plain numbers. The Fund’s staff report says the programme generated losses of GHS 22 billion in 2025, equal to 1.5 percent of GDP. A companion Selected Issues paper published on 4 August puts the same hit at more than US$1.7 billion and says it amounted to about 17 percent of the value of the doré gold the Bank of Ghana sold. Those were losses on the central bank’s programme, not a finding that GoldBod’s own audited surplus for 2025 was false.
What the transfer changes
Until the handover, the Bank of Ghana financed purchases, took the trading risk and absorbed the shortfall. GoldBod’s earlier role was narrower: sourcing artisanal doré through licensed aggregators and earning fees. After the July memorandum, the Fund says GoldBod became the entity responsible for domestic gold purchases. The Bank of Ghana’s remaining job is that of fiscal agent for foreign-exchange operations. GoldBod and the government now absorb the service fees, assay charges and trading margins, and are meant to put those costs on the budget where they can be seen.
That is a real institutional change. It is not the same as ending state gold buying. The staff report is explicit: the programme “remains a fiscal risk as long as state-led domestic gold purchases continue.” Risk that leaves the central bank’s books can still land on taxpayers if GoldBod or the finance ministry has to cover operating losses.
Governor Johnson Pandit Asiama told the Monetary Policy Committee in July that, from 1 July 2026, the Bank had stopped prefinancing GoldBod purchases through its auction arrangements. That matches the Fund’s account of an exit from the old liquidity pipeline.
Where the 2025 losses came from
The Selected Issues paper breaks the doré losses into three parts: fees paid to GoldBod, discounts given to off-takers who export the metal, and exchange-rate losses from buying gold at the forex-bureau rate while accounting at the Bank of Ghana’s reference rate. The Fund calls the spread the most important piece.
In the staff report, BoG losses under the programme equalled 15.3 percent of gross gold purchases. About half of that reflected the bureau-rate purchase. Authorities cut the cost ratio to 11.7 percent in the first quarter of 2026. The memorandum of understanding requires a further cut to 5 percent. The Fund says that will need a narrower forex spread, a cleaner supply chain, more competition among service providers and tougher bargaining with aggregators and off-takers.
The same programme also strained the programme arithmetic with the IMF. A government cost-sharing deal at the end of 2025, including bonds with a par value of GHS 5 billion transferred in March 2026, pushed the Bank’s claims on government through a performance-criterion ceiling. The Board later granted a waiver. An external firm is auditing the Domestic Gold Purchase Programme from its start, with results expected in the third quarter of 2026.
What the buying delivered, and what it did not
The scale helps explain why officials kept the machinery running. Artisanal and small-scale gold exports reached US$10.9 billion in 2025, or 9.5 percent of GDP, according to the Fund. Gold now accounts for more than half of Ghana’s exports, up from about a fifth in 2021. The same papers warn that formalisation remains incomplete: an estimated 229 tonnes of gold worth US$11.4 billion are missing from official trade data between 2019 and 2024, fiscal take from the artisanal sector fell toward zero after the 2025 removal of a 1.5 percent withholding tax on unprocessed precious minerals, and illegal mining is degrading farmland and water in ways the Fund calls a growing drag on longer-term growth.
For readers following the partisan argument over “who lost GH¢22 billion,” the documents draw a sharper line than the slogans. The IMF attributes the 2025 trading losses to the Bank of Ghana’s Domestic Gold Purchase Programme. GoldBod’s later assumption of buying and costs is the forward-looking change.
The central bank has stepped back from financing and from absorbing losses. The gold-buying risk now sits with GoldBod and the budget. That is the change the Fund recorded. It is not the same as the losses leaving the state.