The African Development Bank has adjusted Ghana's growth rate projections to 3.4% for 2024 and 4.3% for 2025.

This is an increase from the 2.8% forecasted in February 2024.

According to the AfDB, this revised growth rate exceeds previous expectations, portraying a positive medium-term growth outlook.

The anticipated growth is expected to be driven by the industry and services sectors on the supply side and by private consumption and investment on the demand side.

Consequently, Ghana is projected to rank 14th in West Africa, ahead of Nigeria, in terms of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth.

However, the outlook is challenged by several factors, including the impact of fiscal consolidation under the Post-Covid Programme for Economic Growth, the ongoing repercussions of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, limited access to finance and foreign exchange, and global macroeconomic shocks. Nonetheless, the AfDB noted that prudent macroeconomic management policies could help mitigate these risks.

To expedite structural transformation, the African Development Bank has encouraged Ghana to boost its competitiveness by alleviating infrastructure constraints and to hasten agro-industrialization by enhancing skills development, among other measures.

“Ghana’s structural transformation needs reinforcement. Productivity has stagnated in services, the dominant employment sector, and is rising only slowly in industry and agriculture. Agriculture’s employment share declined from 53.9% in 2007 to 29.8% in 2019, while industry’s share rose from 14.1% to 21.0% and services’ share rose from 31.9% to 49.2% over the same period. To fast-track structural transformation, Ghana must enhance its competitiveness by easing infrastructure bottlenecks; accelerate agro-industrialization by strengthening skills development, value addition, and private sector development; and create a policy framework for technology adoption and innovation”.

West African growth rate to hit 4.2%

In the meantime, growth in West Africa is anticipated to accelerate, increasing from an estimated 3.6% in 2023 to 4.2% in 2024, and stabilizing at 4.4% the following year.

This marks an improvement of 0.3 percentage points for 2024 compared to the January MEO 2024 projections, driven by stronger growth forecasts in the region's major economies—Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, and Senegal.

Real GDP growth is forecasted to climb to 3.7% in 2024 and is expected to surpass the 2022 rate by 2025, reaching 4.3%, as the impacts of the aforementioned factors diminish.

The anticipated recovery in Africa's average growth will be spearheaded by East Africa (up by 3.4 percentage points) and Southern Africa and West Africa (each increasing by 0.6 percentage points).

Notably, 40 countries are projected to experience higher growth in 2024 compared to 2023, and the number of countries with a growth rate exceeding 5 percent will rise to 17.