The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank have suggested that countries embrace CBDCs. Ghana has heeded this advice and is ready to begin its pilot trial of CBDCs in September
The Bank of Ghana has announced that it will begin testing a central bank digital currency (CBDC) in September in order to strengthen the country’s economy and financial services.
The move, according to Maxwell Opoku-Afari, First Deputy Governor of the Bank of Ghana (BoG), will help increase financial inclusion while enhancing the stability and effectiveness of Ghana’s existing payment infrastructure. He stated, “
We have to take out time to design it with all the security features and so have started it in a pilot phase through what we call a sand-box to learn lessons before we open it up to the general public […] The piloting phase is expected to start by September and the success rate will determine the step.’
The ongoing E-cedi rollout was first announced in June, when Ernest Addison, the Governor of Ghana’s Central Bank, revealed that the government is working on its own digital currency.
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.
Addison stated in a June press statement that the CBDC will go through three phases before entering circulation, the third of which would be a pilot phase “where a few people would be able to utilize the digital cedi on mobile applications.”
