The Ghana cedi appreciates against major foreign currencies in January 2020

This has been a good sign following the constant depreciation against the foreign currencies last year.

A Bank of Ghana’s (BoG) latest Summary of Economic and Financial Data report for the month of January has said.

According to the data, the cedi has found a renewed strength and has so far held its own to make gains on its trading partners.

It added that the cedi in the first month of the year has so far appreciated 0.3 percent against the dollar, made a 1.9 percent gain on the British pound while recording a 2.3 percent appreciation against the Euro.

Cedi depreciation and BoG’s move to halt it

Last year, the cedi depreciated 12.9 percent, 15.7 percent and 11.2 percent against the dollar, pound and euro respectively.

The cedi’s strong performance comes on the back of a number of measures put in place by the central bank as well as the Finance Ministry to resolve the cedi’s perennial struggles against its major trading partners.

The central bank, among other things, announced the commencement of forward fx auctions which basically allows banks and other dealers to make advance purchases of foreign currency to be supplied at an agreed rate later on.

The Bank of Ghana adopted this to help in regulating the supply of foreign currency and to stabilize the cedi for some time.

The central bank’s auction committee in a statement issued this week said it accepted less than fifty percent of the total amount of bids submitted by banks in the forex forward sales for Tuesday, January 28, 2019.

The forty million dollars accepted by the central bank is about 38 million dollars less than the amount the banks bid for.