Cedi, the Ghanaian currency, has become the worst-performing currency in the world. This is according to Bloomberg.
Bloomberg made this claim as Cedi fell to as much as 3.3% on Monday, October 17, 2022, to exchange for 11.2750 cedis per dollar as of Monday afternoon in the capital, Accra.
From January of this year to October, Cedi has lost more than 45% of its value, the highest among 148 currencies that were tracked.
With the slide, the Ghanaian currency has overtaken the Sri Lankan rupee’s losses, slumping nearly 45% against the United States dollar.
How Ghanaian govt intend to stop the Cedi from sliding further
In order to stop the currency from depreciating further, the Ghanaian authorities have approached the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to secure loans of up to $3 billion.
The funds are expected to be secured over a period of three years, and amongst other things, would help the West African country to fight the depreciation of the value of its currency.
Defending the need to secure the credit facilities, President Akufo-Addo cited socio-economic challenges, as he admitted that it was a tough decision to make.
“You can imagine the difficulties that there were for the Bank of Ghana. So instead of now finding 64 dollars for each barrel of oil, the Bank of Ghana was now having to find 100 plus [dollars] and it stayed like that. In fact, it is only very recently that the price of crude oil has come down.
“I am just using this one very important fact to tell you what drove the government to this very difficult decision of going to the IMF. I don’t have any difficulty in admitting that it was a difficult decision for me to take but I felt that in the interest of the country, in the interest of our economy, we had to make that decision,” the President said in an interview on Kumasi-based OTEC FM.
