Background

Over the years, Ghana’s public financial management (PFM) system has faced several challenges, including reliance on incremental budgeting; weaknesses in accounting, auditing and financial reporting; ineffective public expenditure monitoring and control; limited availability of accurate and timely financial information for decision-making; personnel and payroll challenges; incomplete aid and debt management information; limited human resource capacity; and a budget that lacked a medium-term outlook.

In response to these challenges, the government has implemented a series of major PFM reform programmes over the past 2 decades. These include the Public Financial Management Reform Programme (PUFMARP), implemented between 1998 and 2003; the Budget and Public Expenditure Management System (BPEMS), from 2003 to 2007; the Ghana Integrated Financial Management Information System (GIFMIS), from 2010 to 2014; and the Public Financial Management Reform Project, which commenced in 2014 and continues to guide reforms in PFM practices and processes.

These reforms have supported progress across several specific areas of the PFM system. In budget formulation and management, Ghana introduced Activity-Based Budgeting (ABB) and the Medium-Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF) in 2003, followed by Programme-Based Budgeting (PBB) in 2014. A review of PBB is currently underway in 2026. Other reforms include the introduction of multi-year expenditure commitments under Section 33 of the Public Financial Management Act (PFMA), Citizens’ Budgets, and commitment authorisation provisions under Section 24 of the Public Procurement Amended Act, 2025.

In treasury and cash management, Ghana introduced a Treasury Single Account (TSA) to rationalise the structure of government bank accounts, improve transparency and reduce government borrowing costs. Debt management reforms have also been significant, particularly Ghana’s debt restructuring process, which began in December 2022 and is now in its final stages. The PFMA also established a Sinking Fund to support debt management.

While these reforms demonstrate Ghana’s sustained efforts to strengthen its PFM system, it is important to look beyond the reforms themselves and understand what prompted them. This includes examining the challenges and opportunities the government was responding to, the initial assumptions about which solutions might work, how these assumptions evolved during implementation, what has worked well, and the challenges emerged in practice. This includes considering how institutions have sought to balance the need for budget stability and accountability with the flexibility required to respond to changing circumstances.

This forms part of the ongoing phase of CABRI’s 2025 Budget Practices and Procedures (BPP) survey programme, which seeks to better understand countries’ reform interests, the type of support required at country level, and opportunities for deeper in-country engagement, particularly in areas that may not have been fully explored. A particular focus is on understanding how changes in budget procedures and practices have responded to rapidly shifting social, economic and political environments and on capturing authentic country perspectives on budget and PFM reforms over time.

Ghana Budget Practices and Procedures 2025 Findings

Ghana participated in the 2025 Budget Practices and Procedures (BPP) Survey, which provides important insights into the evolution of PFM systems across Africa between 2015 and 2025. The ten-year period covered by the survey provides a useful opportunity to reflect on Ghana’s reform progress, while also identifying areas where challenges persist.

The findings point to significant progress across several dimensions of Ghana’s PFM system:

• PFM architecture: Ghana has established laws and strategies to support its PFM system. While expenditure ceilings for the outer years of the medium-term framework remain indicative, annual ceilings are binding, and entities are required to adhere to them
• Budget transparency: Ghana maintains relatively comprehensive and timely publication of fiscal information and core budget documents, supporting public access and independent scrutiny.
• Oversight and accountability: The availability of fiscal information, combined with relatively strong institutional arrangements, supports greater scrutiny and downstream accountability.
• Executive budget preparation and parliamentary scrutiny: Ghana has institutionalised forms of pre-budget debate, giving Parliament formal influence over the macro-fiscal framework before the budget is finalised. However, the legislature is among the few in the survey that cannot amend the executive's budget proposal and can only approve or reject it in full.
• Legislative and analytical capacity: Ghana combines relatively comprehensive parliamentary submissions with active Public Accounts Committees and dedicated research capacity. The country has a legislative budget research office, supported by parliamentary advisers with PFM expertise.
• Programme-based and performance budgeting: Ghana is among six countries with formal legal or decree-based adoption of programme-based or performance budgeting, alongside The Gambia, Mauritius, Burkina Faso, Kenya and Côte d’Ivoire.
• Fiscal risk management and contingent liabilities: Ghana performs strongly across the four assessed dimensions of fiscal-risk visibility, including consolidation of off-budget entities, legislative reporting on extra-budgetary funds, tax-expenditure costing, and the reporting and auditing of contingent liabilities.
• Expenditure enforcement and control: Ghana is among the countries identified as having relatively robust budget execution practices, alongside Côte d’Ivoire and Burkina Faso.
• Supplementary budgets: Ghana reported no supplementary budgets during the three-year reference period, despite supplementary budgets remaining relatively frequent in several other countries.

The survey also highlights broader improvements in institutional and legislative capacity, including the creation or strengthening of budget research functions for the legislature, progress in international accounting standards, improvements in internal audit follow-up, and strengthened executive spending control mechanisms. Taken together, these findings point to an important tension within Ghana’s budget system: the need for greater stability and predictability in budget allocations and commitments, while retaining sufficient flexibility to respond to changing fiscal and policy circumstances. For example, indicative rather than binding expenditure ceilings may provide room for adjustment, while restrictions on parliamentary amendments and the absence of supplementary budgets point to stronger controls over changes to the approved budget. These features raise broader questions about how budget flexibility can be exercised without weakening the credibility and accountability of the original budget.

Telling the Ghana Story

Ghana’s budget reform experience spans several areas of the PFM system. The Citizens’ Budget and Programme-Based Budgeting provide two examples of how reforms have evolved over time, including how initial approaches have been adapted in response to implementation experience and changing institutional and fiscal circumstances. These experiences also illustrate some of the broader future opportunities and challenges involved in translating PFM reforms into sustained improvements in budget management, transparency, and accountability.

The citizens budget illustrates Ghana’s efforts to strengthen budget transparency and citizen engagement. Its introduction has provided an important mechanism for making budget information more accessible and enabling citizens to engage with government expenditure and allocation decisions.

The BPP findings complement this story, showing that Ghana maintains relatively comprehensive and timely publication of core fiscal documents. Ghana is also among the 14 of the 18 countries assessed that produce a Citizens’ Budget.

However, Ghana’s experience also illustrates how reforms have evolved in response to implementation challenges. The production of simplified budget information was an important first step, but printed documents were limited by literacy barriers, particularly where information was primarily available in English. In response, the government worked with the Bureau of Ghana Languages to produce simplified versions in nine local languages. These versions have been used during community engagement fora and citizens’ town halls to stimulate discussion around public expenditure.

The government has also expanded its communication approaches beyond printed materials and social media, increasingly using audio-visual formats to reach wider audiences. This illustrates how the reform has evolved from an initial emphasis on transparency and publication towards a broader focus on accessibility, communication, and meaningful citizen engagement. It also raises an important question about the next stage of the reform: how Ghana can ensure that greater access to budget information translates into sustained citizen understanding, engagement and accountability. Programme-Based Budgeting provides another important example. The BPP Survey identifies Ghana as one of six African countries with formal legal or decree-based adoption of programme-based or performance budgeting. However, formal adoption does not necessarily translate into consistent implementation. Ghana’s experience points to the need for deeper engagement with ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs), as well as Parliament, to better understand how PBB is applied in practice.

Implementation challenges remain, particularly where MDAs do not receive the resources required to implement approved programmes and where institutional and technical capacity is uneven. Changes in political leadership and parliamentary structures can also affect reform continuity. At the local level, limited technical capacity among officials may constrain the implementation of PBB, resulting in situations where actual expenditure management reverts to more traditional approaches.

These challenges are particularly important in understanding how changes in budget procedures and practices respond to rapidly shifting political environments. New administrations may introduce new policies into existing reform structures, creating pressures for adaptation, and, in some cases, disrupting ongoing reforms. The implementation of PBB therefore needs to be understood not only as a technical reform, but also within the broader political and institutional environment in which it operates.

Ghana’s experience reflects a broader finding from the BPP Survey: while the shift towards programme-based and performance budgeting has been widely pursued across African countries, implementation has often created significant challenges as institutions adjust to new processes, systems and capacity requirements. The ongoing review of PBB in 2026 is particularly relevant in this regard, as it provides an opportunity to understand what aspects of the reform have worked, where implementation gaps remain, and what Ghana is seeking to address in its next phase.

Understanding these experiences in greater depth will help move beyond documenting whether reforms were introduced to examining how they were implemented, how they adapted over time, what enabled progress, and why some intended outcomes may not have materialised. Ghana’s ongoing review of PBB and its continued efforts to strengthen the Citizens’ Budget provide an opportunity to further understand how these reforms are evolving in response to emerging institutional, fiscal and accountability challenges. This can help capture Ghana’s reform journey in a way that generates practical lessons not only for the country itself, but also for peer learning and the adaptation of relevant experiences across different country contexts.