Ghana’s economy expanded 6.0% year-on-year in the second quarter of 2026, according to the Ghana Statistical Service, slowing from 6.6% growth in the same quarter a year earlier. First-half growth for 2026 came in at 6.2%, building on a provisional 6.4% expansion in the first quarter.
The growth was heavily weighted toward services, which grew 8.0% and accounted for 57.6% of the quarter’s overall expansion. Industry grew 4.3%, helped by a 21.4% jump in oil and gas activity, while agriculture grew a more modest 3.9%, held back by a sharp 24.7% contraction in fishing.
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Within services, the standout was information and communication technology, which surged 30.9%, up from 21.3% a year earlier, and alone contributed 41.5% of total GDP growth in the quarter. Government statistician Alhassan Iddrisu said the figure was not a one-off spike, pointing to three consecutive years of double-digit ICT growth every quarter, and described Ghana’s growth story as now substantially a digital one. He added that a 6.0% growth rate only counts for something once it shows up as better jobs, stronger services and real opportunity reaching more people.
The growth figures arrive alongside a broader stabilisation in Ghana’s macroeconomic position. Annual inflation has fallen to around 5.0%, down from a peak of 54.1% in December 2022, while the country’s debt-to-GDP ratio improved to 45.3% by the end of 2025, ahead of its own restructuring targets. The IMF completed the sixth and final review of Ghana’s Extended Credit Facility arrangement in July, approving a final disbursement of SDR 265.9 million, equivalent to roughly $371 million (R6.01 billion), bringing the three-year, $3 billion (R48.6 billion) programme to a close.
One figure worth flagging for context: even with first-half 2026 growth running at 6.2%, the IMF’s own full-year 2026 forecast for Ghana sits at just 4.8%, itself only a modest upgrade from an earlier 4.6% estimate. The fund attributed that upgrade to stronger-than-expected performance under its support programme, sustained fiscal discipline and improving macroeconomic conditions generally, rather than to any specific second-half concern. But the gap between a 6.2% first-half outturn and a 4.8% full-year projection is wide enough that one of the two numbers will likely need to move: either growth slows markedly in the second half, or the IMF’s forecast gets revised upward again, as it already has been once this year.
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Taken together, the data point to an economy whose recovery is broadening beyond the oil and commodity cycles that have driven much of its volatility over the past decade, with a resilient non-oil economy growing 5.9% in the first half even as oil and gas output itself accelerated. At the same time, a growth story this concentrated in a single sub-sector, ICT, raises its own distributional question, one Iddrisu himself raised unprompted: whether an expansion this narrowly driven can still deliver the broad-based job creation that headline GDP figures on their own cannot guarantee.