A targeted enforcement operation by the Bank of Ghana has thrust a niche but growing segment of Accra’s informal economy into a sharp institutional spotlight, raising pointed questions about how central banks calibrate regulatory authority against the realities of street-level entrepreneurship.
On Monday, Ghanaian police, acting in coordination with the Bank of Ghana, arrested seven women at multiple locations across Accra. Their alleged offence: crafting decorative bouquets and cakes assembled from Ghana cedi banknotes, gift items that have become fixtures at university graduation ceremonies, weddings, and birthday celebrations across the country. The arrests mark the most visible enforcement action since the central bank issued a formal public notice in July warning that such practices violate the Currency Act and carry penalties including fines or imprisonment.
The institutional logic is unambiguous. Dinah Bonzi, head of the statistics office at the Bank of Ghana’s Currency Management Department, told AFP that “this practice constitutes improper use of the currency and is a violation of the law,” adding that “anyone found culpable of misusing or abusing it will be dealt with.” The Bank had previously flagged a broader range of currency misuse, including spraying cash at public events, stepping on banknotes, and writing on or altering notes, all of which it frames as affronts to the cedi’s status as legal tender.
The cedi’s integrity is not a trivial concern. Ghana’s currency has endured sustained depreciation pressure over the past decade, with the exchange rate against the US dollar falling from roughly GHS 4 per dollar in 2017 to above GHS 15 by late 2024. The Bank of Ghana, which secured a staff-level agreement with the International Monetary Fund in 2023 as part of a broader GHS 21.3 billion debt restructuring programme, has had to fight hard to rebuild institutional credibility and monetary confidence. From that vantage point, visible disrespect for the physical currency carries symbolic weight that regulators are unwilling to dismiss.
Yet the arrests have landed with considerable force on a segment of Accra’s informal economy that operates entirely outside formal financial circuits. A bouquet maker who spoke to AFP under the pseudonym Sandra Smith, and who has sold money bouquets at university graduation events for five years, described the crackdown as disproportionate. “The bouquets add colour and flavour to such occasions, and right after the recipients take out the money and use it,” she said, arguing that the banknotes remain in circulation and suffer no lasting damage. “I feel the authorities are going too far to arrest innocent young ladies who are finding means to create jobs for themselves.”
That tension is real and institutionally significant. Ghana’s informal economy accounts for an estimated 30 to 40 percent of GDP by most regional assessments, and female-led micro-enterprises within it absorb a disproportionate share of urban youth employment. When enforcement actions target this layer of economic activity without accompanying formalization pathways or graduated penalty structures, the regulatory cost falls almost exclusively on those with the fewest legal resources to absorb it.
West African peers offer instructive contrasts. Nigeria’s Central Bank has similarly prohibited currency mutilation and spray-cash practices, but enforcement has been episodic and rarely extended to the producers of novelty currency products. Senegal, operating within the WAEMU monetary union and subject to BCEAO oversight, applies currency protection rules through a harmonized regional legal framework that distributes enforcement responsibility across member states, diluting the concentrated impact any single crackdown might have. Ghana, as a non-WAEMU member with its own central bank and monetary sovereignty, bears the full institutional weight of these decisions independently, which makes the calibration of enforcement all the more consequential for its domestic credibility.
The ECOWAS Monetary Cooperation Programme, which has long aspired toward a single West African currency, the ECO, makes currency governance a matter of regional political economy, not just domestic policy. Ghana’s ability to demonstrate disciplined monetary management, including respect for legal tender rules, feeds directly into its positioning within those ongoing negotiations. The Bank of Ghana’s assertiveness on currency integrity can be read partly through that lens: an institution signalling institutional seriousness to both domestic audiences and regional partners.
What the current enforcement framework does not yet provide is a proportionate response mechanism. The Currency Act, as applied, appears to offer binary outcomes, prosecution or non-prosecution, without the graduated administrative penalty structure that would allow regulators to sanction first-time or low-scale offenders without criminal arrest. Building that intermediate layer, through administrative fines, licensing of novelty currency products, or formal warnings with compliance windows, would give the Bank of Ghana a more precise instrument and reduce the reputational cost of scenes involving the handcuffing of market women.
The Bank of Ghana has confirmed that enforcement will continue. How it continues matters as much as whether it does.
