The Finance Minister, Dr Cassiel Ato Forson, has spent the past few weeks introducing Ghanaians to what he calls the “New Economy.”
He has taken it to the Association of Ghana Industries, to the Trade Ministry and to the banks, and we are told the full details will come in the 2027 Budget. The message is that Ghana should produce more of what it consumes and create jobs at home.
I agree with that goal, and so would most Ghanaians. Our own government pursued it through One District One Factory and Planting for Food and Jobs. The difficulty is that this administration came to office with a string of programmes it said would deliver exactly this, and almost none of them can show results. Rather than finish what it started, the government is now moving on to a new promise. Before the country is asked to invest hope and money in it, Ghanaians deserve an honest report on the old ones.
Where are the results?
The 24-Hour Economy was presented as the heart of the NDC’s economic plan. It promised 1.7 million decent jobs by the end of 2028. For 2026, its direct budget allocation was GH¢110 million. When I asked in July what the programme had achieved, the Secretariat pointed to 268 filling stations and 33 manufacturers operating in shifts.
Anyone who has bought fuel at midnight in Accra or Kumasi knows those filling stations were open long before this government arrived. The Centre for Policy Scrutiny raised the same concern in its review of the mid-year budget.
The Secretariat also spoke of 160,000 jobs from recently signed agreements. I described those numbers at the time as audio announcements, and I stand by it. Until we can see the workers, the firms employing them and the SSNIT contributions being paid on their behalf, Ghanaians have no way of knowing whether those jobs exist.
The Women’s Development Bank was one of the most attractive promises of the 2024 campaign. Almost two years on, it has not lent a single cedi.
Government allocated GH¢51.3 million to it in 2025 and several hundred million more in 2026, and the Minister told Parliament in July that GH¢400 million had been deposited at the Bank of Ghana as capital. The company was only incorporated in January 2026 and is still waiting for a banking licence. Women’s groups such as NETRIGHT are now publicly asking government to hurry up. Market women who were told help was coming are still borrowing from susu collectors and moneylenders at the same punishing rates.
The One Million Coders Programme promised to train a million young Ghanaians over four years and open pathways to jobs and remote work. The target for 2026 alone was 300,000. By the mid-year review, the Minister reported 140,000 registrations, 40,000 enrolments and about 28,000 people who had completed at least one module. That last figure is the one government now leads with, and it tells us very little. Finishing one module is a long way from being a coder, and there is still no published figure for how many trainees have found work.
Then there is Feed Ghana, and in particular its poultry component, Nkoko Nkitinkiti. It was meant to cut our chicken import bill by setting up households in poultry production. In July, the Agriculture Minister told Parliament’s Assurances Committee that some beneficiaries had eaten the birds instead of rearing them. The Poultry Farmers Association called the first phase an “abysmal failure” and said its offer to train beneficiaries for free was ignored. The Minister insists the project is a success and points to falling poultry prices, but he has not published how many beneficiaries are still in production or what has happened to import volumes. Meanwhile, livestock farmers told The Fourth Estate in August that the programme’s promises on cattle, goats, sheep and pigs had not reached them, and government confirmed those components had not yet started.
The New Economy, as described so far, will commit about US$10 billion over four years to commercial agriculture, mining value addition, energy and transport infrastructure. Commercial agriculture already sits under Feed Ghana. Agro-processing and energy projects such as the Buipe solar plant are already listed under the 24-Hour Economy. Access to finance for small producers was the whole point of the Women’s Development Bank. It is hard to see what the new label adds, other than a fresh starting point from which the government can measure itself.
Whose stability?
The Minister credits the government’s “bold reforms” for lower inflation, a steadier cedi and returning investor confidence. It is worth asking which of the NDC’s own ideas produced any of that.
What the country is enjoying today grew from seeds the NPP planted. The IMF programme that anchored the recovery was negotiated and secured by the NPP government in May 2023. The domestic debt exchange, which eased pressure on interest payments and maturities, was ours. So was the June 2024 agreement with bilateral and commercial creditors, and the Eurobond exchange that cut the stock of Ghana’s external debt. By the time power changed hands, inflation had fallen from 54.1 percent at the end of 2022 to 23.8 percent, and the economy had grown 5.7 percent in 2024.
The NDC inherited that programme, ran it to its final review in July 2026, and has taken the harvest to market with its own label on it.
The fiscal discipline the government now boasts about was built inside that same programme. The IMF framework required Ghana to run primary surpluses, and in 2025 the government wrote a floor of 1.5 percent of GDP into law. The programme ended in July.
Within weeks, the Minister announced that the floor would be cut to 0.5 percent from 2027 to make room for the New Economy, alongside new revenue measures worth another 0.5 percent of GDP. The IMF has said the country can still meet its debt target on the lower path, but only if revenue collection, public investment management and the finances of state enterprises in energy and cocoa improve, and none of those has yet been fixed. With about GH¢58 billion in restructured domestic bonds falling due in 2027 and GH¢53 billion in 2028, Ghanaians are entitled to ask whether this government’s discipline was ever its own, or whether it lasted only as long as the IMF was in the room.
What Parliament should ask for
I would urge the government to put the New Economy on hold and first report properly on the commitments it has already made. It should publish a register of 24-Hour Economy jobs that can be checked against payroll and SSNIT records. It should give Parliament a firm date for the Women’s Development Bank to start lending and publish its lending criteria. It should tell us how many One Million Coders graduates are now employed, and it should commission an independent audit of Nkoko Nkitinkiti beneficiaries. And before Parliament is asked to amend the fiscal responsibility law, the Minister should come with a costed plan for the 2027 and 2028 maturities, evidence of progress on the reforms the IMF has flagged, and a commitment to audited, separate reporting on how the freed-up money is spent.
Parliament should not agree to weaken the country’s fiscal anchor to fund a programme whose details have not even been published.
Ghanaians voted in 2024 for jobs, for relief from the cost of living, and for the specific programmes the NDC put before them. Two years later, those programmes sit half-delivered while the government invites us to look at a new one. The promises made in 2024 have not expired, and the government should be held to every one of them.
