With barely less than two months to end the year, the cedi could be heading for its best performance since 2017 when it lost only 4.88% in value to the dollar.
This follows a relative stability in the local currency for the greater part of this year.
So far this year, the cedi has lost only 3.1% value to the dollar, against over 9.0% last year.
Analysts are attributing the strong performance of the local currency to the interventions by the Bank of Ghana and the diversified economy.
Senior Research Analyst with Databank Research, Courage Martey believes the Central Bank is well positioned to deal with any pressure on the local currency.
“Specific performance [cedi’s performance] is still generally very strong and it’s still, I would say very impressive year-to-date performance against the US dollar. It has lost about 3.1 percent and this compares favourably with same period last year when we lost over 9.0%. So I would say that so far, it’s still doing quite good and even with the uncertainty around it’s still been impressive.”
“And we still hold our stand that the cedi will remain stable until year-end despite the domestic and external elections uncertainty. I mean the domestic election coming up in December 2020 and the US elections which is happening this week; we see the cedi being steady because the Bank of Ghana has held a very strong, convincing and a very credible monetary policy till now. So that should be able to anchor exchange rate expectations, remaining stable until the end of year.
Analysts earlier were hopeful the cedi will end the year with a year-to-date depreciation of less than 5.0%, based on the current trend.
The local currency started the year at GHS5.53.
Historical performance of the cedi to dollar in recent times
2019 12.9% depreciation
2018 8.4% depreciation
2017 4.9% depreciation
2016 9.6% depreciation
