The seminar room at Harvard University’s Center for International Development will, come October, host something rarely offered in academic settings: a sitting account of a central bank’s survival. Dr. Ernest Addison, who stepped down as Governor of the Bank of Ghana in March 2025 after eight years at the helm, has been appointed a Short-Term Senior Research Fellow at both the Center for International Development (CID) and the Center for African Studies (CAS). He will lead four student seminar sessions drawing directly from one of West Africa’s most turbulent monetary policy episodes in recent memory.
The appointment is not merely honorific. It positions Ghana’s monetary experience, with all its structural contradictions and hard-won corrections, at the center of a global policy conversation about what central banks can and cannot do when fiscal discipline collapses around them.
Addison took the governorship in 2017 inheriting a financial sector riddled with undercapitalized and poorly supervised institutions. What followed was one of the most sweeping banking cleanups in West African history: the resolution of nine banks and 347 other financial institutions, accompanied by the introduction of capital and supervisory requirements aligned with Basel III standards. For a region where regulatory forbearance has historically shielded politically connected lenders, the Bank of Ghana’s willingness to enforce hard exits carried genuine institutional significance, signaling to ECOWAS peers that regulatory credibility was achievable without external receivership.
The first half of Addison’s tenure produced results that drew regional attention. Ghana posted growth rates that placed it among the continent’s stronger performers, and the financial sector cleanup, painful as it was for depositors and shareholders, restored a degree of confidence in the banking system’s solvency. Macroeconomic management through this period offered a working model of what a West African central bank could accomplish when given operational space and political backing.
Then the shocks arrived, sequentially and without mercy. The COVID-19 pandemic compressed fiscal revenues while demanding emergency expenditure. The Russia-Ukraine war drove commodity and energy prices upward, widening Ghana’s import bill and pressuring the cedi. These were external variables no monetary authority could fully absorb, but the interaction between those shocks and Ghana’s pre-existing fiscal vulnerabilities proved catastrophic. A succession of credit-rating downgrades shut Ghana out of international capital markets. Debt servicing consumed an increasingly unsustainable share of government revenue. By late 2022, Ghana had returned to an IMF-supported programme and was negotiating a major debt restructuring that touched both external creditors and domestic bondholders, the latter a politically sensitive intervention with direct consequences for the pension funds and banks holding government paper.
It is this second chapter, the crisis years, that will likely generate the sharpest analytical scrutiny at Harvard. The central question, one that Addison himself will be expected to address directly, is the degree to which the Bank of Ghana’s monetary financing of fiscal deficits during the pandemic period accelerated the loss of macroeconomic stability. The bank’s balance sheet expanded significantly as it extended credit to government, a decision defended at the time as crisis management but later identified by the IMF and independent analysts as a contributing factor to the inflation surge and cedi depreciation that followed. In a monetary union like WAEMU, where the BCEAO operates under a strict monetary financing prohibition enforced by a Franco-African institutional framework, the contrast with Ghana’s experience is instructive and will not be lost on Harvard’s students of comparative central banking.
Among the corrective mechanisms Addison is expected to examine is the Domestic Gold Purchase Programme, an innovative instrument through which the Bank of Ghana acquired gold from licensed small-scale miners in local currency, then deployed those reserves to bolster foreign exchange buffers. The programme contributed to a meaningful strengthening of the cedi and supported Ghana’s convergence toward debt sustainability benchmarks under the IMF arrangement. It also demonstrated a degree of institutional creativity, leveraging Ghana’s natural resource base to address a monetary problem, that carries lessons for other commodity-producing economies in the ECOWAS zone navigating similar reserve pressures.
The Harvard fellowship arrives at a moment when Ghana’s institutional credibility is being rebuilt incrementally. The country returned to international bond markets in 2024, and inflation, while still elevated, has trended downward from its 2022 peak above 50 percent. The Bank of Ghana, under new leadership since Addison’s departure, is operating within the constraints of the IMF programme’s conditionalities, including commitments on central bank independence and limits on monetary financing that the programme formalized in law. Whether those commitments hold beyond the programme period will depend on the quality of Ghana’s fiscal institutions, not just its monetary ones.
For West Africa’s policy community, the value of Addison’s Harvard seminars lies precisely in their granularity. Abstract debates about central bank independence, monetary financing ceilings, or the sequencing of financial sector reform gain traction when grounded in a specific institutional history with named decisions, dated interventions, and measurable outcomes. Ghana’s experience between 2017 and 2025 offers exactly that kind of case study: a central bank that achieved genuine supervisory reform, then found itself pulled into fiscal accommodation under political and pandemic pressure, and ultimately participated in a stabilization that required rewriting its own operating constraints.
Policymakers in Accra, Lagos, Abidjan, and Dakar will be watching what Addison says, and what he chooses not to say. The architecture of West African monetary cooperation, including the long-stalled ECOWAS single currency project, rests partly on the credibility of member states’ central banks as independent, rules-bound institutions. Ghana’s decade under Addison is now part of the evidentiary record that will inform those negotiations. A candid account of where institutional guardrails held and where they bent, delivered not in a government communiqué but in a Harvard seminar room, may prove more useful to regional monetary architects than any formal policy paper.
Dr. Addison spent eight years at the intersection of ambition and constraint. In October, he will spend four sessions explaining what that intersection looks like from the inside.
