Ghanaian Finance Minister Ken Ofori-Atta will travel to Beijing on Wednesday to meet with Chinese officials to discuss a proposed restructuring of Ghana’s debt.
According to sources, the minister traveled to Addis Ababa over the weekend to attend UNECA’s high-level ministerial meeting on the global financial framework.
Ofori Atta is expected to travel to China after this meeting, possibly on March 22, 2023. In addition to asking for financial guarantees for Ghana’s program with the International Monetary Fund, the minister leading the government delegation is expected to continue to seek bilateral relations.
Due to schedule conflicts with the session of the National People’s Congress in early March 2023, it was postponed to the end of March.
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Ghana, which is going through its worst economic crisis in a generation, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) reached a team-level agreement on a $3 billion loan in December, but the IMF board must approve the program first before Creditors can be recruited. to provide financing guarantees.
With a debt of around $1.7 billion, China is Ghana’s largest bilateral creditor. A source speaking to US news agency Reuters said the current administration’s main priority is to obtain approval from the International Monetary Fund’s Board of Directors, with details of debt management operations to be announced later.
The Finance Ministry said the first China-Ghana debt talks this month were “amicable and fruitful”. Ghana has defaulted on virtually most of its external debt over the past year and has yet to negotiate deals with international private-sector bondholders.
Ghana has already restructured its domestic debt and has applied for a restructuring of its bilateral debt under the Common Framework Initiative, backed by the G20 major economies. There is still no formal creditors’ committee to conduct negotiations with state creditors.
