The Ghana cedi has emerged the best currency in Africa for the first quarter of 2021.
It ended the quarter with a year-to-date appreciation of 0.6% against the dollar.
This year’s first quarter performance of the Ghana cedi against the dollar is similar to its 2020 performance.
The Ghana cedi was ranked
among 15 important African currencies including the Egyptian pound, Nigerian naira and South African rand.
A Senior Economic Analyst at Databank Research, Courage Martey, is reported to have told Joy Business that “the Ghana cedi ended the first quarter of 2021 with yet another impressive performance, similar to what it did in the first quarter of 2020. You will recall that in the first quarter of 2020, the local currency ended the quarter with an appreciation of almost 1.7% against the US dollar and that made it the second most resilient currency in our basket of 15 African currencies, only behind the Egyptian pound.”
He is further quoted as saying
“It is quite impressive, against the fact that the pandemic has not yet given way so there is still so much uncertainties within the global financial market space”.
“Immense thanks to the Bank of Ghana’s intervention measures, particularly on the FX forward market but the significant inflows of foreign portfolio investments into the bond market especially during the course of this year has been significantly supportive of the Ghana cedi to put up the kind of performance we are seeing in the first quarter of 2021”.
Performance
Ghana cedi 0.55%
Egyptian pound 0.18%
Nigerian naira 0.00%
Tanzania shilling 0.00%
Kenya shilling -0.31%
By Melvin Tarlue