Deputy Managing Director for Operations and Support Functions at Fidelity Bank Ghana, Atta Yeboah Gyan has called for a deliberate and coordinated effort to redirect capital into the sectors that drive Ghana’s economic output but remain systemically underserved by formal credit; arguing that the country’s hard-won macroeconomic stability will only translate into lasting prosperity if the financial sector addresses the structural barriers that keep productive enterprises disconnected from the capital they need.
Atta Yeboah Gyan made the remarks while speaking at the Business and Financial Times’ Money Summit 2026, under the theme “Building Trust, Capital and Stability for Ghana’s Economic Future.”
Mr. Gyan acknowledged the significance of Ghana’s economic recovery, citing real GDP growth of 6% in the fourth quarter of 2025, inflation declining from 23.8% in December 2024 to 5.4% by year-end, and gross international reserves reaching US$13.9 billion as of April 2026 — equivalent to 5.5 months of import cover.
But he was equally candid about the fault lines that remain. The agriculture sector, which anchored a 26% year-on-year widening of Ghana’s trade surplus to US$5.28 billion in April 2026, carries a non-performing loan ratio of 54.7% as at February 2026. “There is a fundamental mismatch between where our export strength comes from and where our credit is going,” he said.
At the heart of his address was what he described as a trust deficit with two distinct faces. The first is structural; credit assessment tools built for a different kind of economy that render millions of economically active Ghanaians effectively invisible to the formal financial system.
The second is historical, shaped by the 2017/2018 banking sector cleanup and the domestic debt exchange programme, both of which left lasting damage to public confidence in financial institutions. “Building trust, in this environment, is a deliberate project,” Mr. Gyan said. “It requires showing up consistently. It requires making decisions that are good for the long term, even when they are harder in the short term.”
He pointed to Fidelity Bank’s own initiatives as evidence that bankable models exist in underserved sectors. Through the Mastercard Foundation’s BRIDGE-in-Agriculture programme, the bank disbursed GHS 66.9 million last year, financing that created 12,912 new jobs, sustained 11,566 existing ones, and reached 22,247 smallholder farmers — 62.4% of whom were women.
Through its GreenTech Innovation Challenge, the bank awarded GHS 1.02 million in grants to 16 climate-smart businesses in 2025 alone. The Orange Corners Innovation Fund, supported by the Kingdom of the Netherlands, has disbursed GHS 9.83 million to over 55 young entrepreneurs across agribusiness, fashion, technology, and the creative industries, creating over 1,000 jobs.
The Orange Inspire Creative Challenge deployed GHS 550,000 in grants and concessionary loans to support Ghana’s creative sector. “These are small numbers relative to the scale of the problem,” he acknowledged. “But they represent a proof of concept that bankable models exist, and they need to be built and scaled.”
He closed with three concrete recommendations for the industry. First, a co-designed risk-sharing infrastructure for agricultural credit, involving government, development finance institutions, and commercial banks.
Second, faster and deeper adoption of alternative credit assessment frameworks drawing on mobile money data, supply chain data, and digital transaction histories to unlock creditworthiness for Ghanaians invisible to the current system.
Third, patient capital like grants, concessionary loans, and blended finance instruments; treated not as charity but as strategic investment in the sectors that will define Ghana’s economic identity in the next decade.
“Ghana has done something genuinely hard,” Atta Yeboah Gyan said. “It came back from the edge. Now the question is what we build with the stability we have earned.”
