Integration in West Africa has come in fits and starts, and with varying levels of success. With two large economic blocs – including the 16-member ECOWAS grouping and the smaller subset of Francophone members, the 8-member West African Economic and Monetary Union (Union Economique et Monétaire Ouest Africaine, UEMOA) – West Africa has a variety of agreements in place that stitch together its…
As in many emerging markets, small companies, start-ups and entrepreneurs have a difficult time raising funds in Ghana, particularly given the high interest rates for commercial loans. The stock market – where listing can be challenging for a smaller firm and where trading is minimal – is also not currently a practical avenue for early-stage funding. The main board is dominated by larger firms,…
Since the Insurance Act of 2006 was passed, regulators have been looking at solvency, capital and inclusiveness, and issuing frameworks and guidelines to compel insurers to strengthen their balance sheets and reserve against unforeseen claims. This has encouraged them to write more micro-insurance policies. No Premium, No Cover (NPNC) The regulators have been working especially hard towards making…
The country’s insurance sector is open and liberalised and, as with Ghana’s other major financial service sectors, has benefitted extensively from foreign investment. Since the 1990s, capital and expertise have entered the insurance market and helped in the development of the sector. As of early 2014, more than half of the insurance companies in Ghana were foreign controlled. However, as is the…
US and European players have historically dominated the global reinsurance segment, and Africa – where other than a handful of small, government-backed reinsurers benefiting from mandated local coverage requirements, reinsurance contracts have generally gone abroad – is no exception. However, this is beginning to change, as the high growth in Africa’s emerging markets, combined with more robust…
To date, Ghana has followed a traditional course in the development and sale of insurance products: companies design and underwrite policies and brokers and agents are used to distributed them. As a result, penetration rates are relatively low. Much of Ghana is poor or rural or both, limiting exposure to classic distribution channels and necessarily confining the customer base to middle and upper-middle…
Like many resource-rich countries, Ghana aims to strike a balance between ensuring revenues generated by its mineral wealth flow back to public coffers and maintaining a fiscal environment conducive to investment. Changes in recent years have increased taxes and royalties on the sector as the government has looked to both boost income as well as standardise practices across extractive industries. Major…
The decline in the global price of gold in 2013 came as costs continued to rise. The resulting squeeze had a significant impact on Ghana’s mining industry, which launched a programme of rationalisation. The stable prices of the following year were too low for some Ghanaian operations to continue, though cost pressures eased. If the gold price rises once more, the leaner sector should be in a good…
Although often overlooked by outside investors, small miners play a central role in Ghana’s gold industry. Counting groups and individuals, both regulated and unlicensed, they account for nearly 35% of total production, according to 2013 figures from the Minerals Commission. As the Ghana Chamber of Mines (GCM) points out, this is 10 percentage points higher than Gold Fields Group, the largest mining…
While there is plenty of fertile land available for agriculture in Ghana – an estimated 6.1m ha of its 13.6m ha of agricultural land is not cultivated at present – land acquisition remains a challenging process. As stipulated in Ghana’s constitution, a variety of customary tenure systems run by chiefs govern land use in the country. Around 80% of all land falls under these frameworks, designating…
