The Central Bank of Ghana is “in the advanced stages of introducing a digital currency,” Gov. Ernest Addison said during a press conference in Accra earlier this week.
Addison revealed, “the Bank of Ghana was one of the first African Central Banks to declare that we were working on a digital currency looking at the concept of an e-cedi.”
“We are quite advanced in that process,” Addison said. “With these types of things, you have to go at it in phases and the first phase was really on the design of the electronic money and the team that has gone quite far in the design phase, they are looking at the implementation phase.”
The next will be a pilot “where a few people would be able to use the digital cedi on the mobile applications.” After that the bank will decide whether the incipient central bank digital currency (CBDC) is feasible and what needs to be tweaked, Addison told reporters.
In February, Ghana’s central bank partnered with Emtech, a digital transformation consortium, to launch a sandbox focused on areas like blockchain, CBDCs and financial inclusion.
Meanwhile, Addison also used the same news conference to draw comparisons between the “unregulated” cryptocurrencies like bitcoin (BTC), which is “too volatile to play the function of money” and the state-backed cedi. Reiterating his backing central bank digital currencies, Addison said: “I think there is a lot more emphasis on looking at digital money which is backed by the state, backed by the central banks. These private forms of money really are not able to perform the functions of money effectively.”
With this revelation, Ghana becomes one of the few countries on the African continent to take concrete steps towards this goal. Many other African states are yet to make similar progress.