Ernest Addison: Former Bank of Ghana Governor Appointed Research Fellow at Harvard

• Former Bank of Ghana Governor Dr Ernest Addison has been appointed a Short-Term Senior Research Fellow at Harvard University
• Addison will lead four student seminar sessions at Harvard in October, drawing on his eight-year tenure at the helm of Ghana's central bank
• The seminars will cover Ghana's financial sector cleanup, its response to COVID-19, the Russia-Ukraine war shock, and the country's debt restructuring

Dr Ernest Addison, who served as Governor of the Bank of Ghana from 2017 until his retirement in March 2025, has been appointed a Short-Term Senior Research Fellow at Harvard University's Center for International Development (CID) and Center for African Studies (CAS).

The appointment tasks Dr Addison with leading four CID student seminar sessions scheduled for October, during which he will reflect on eight years of monetary policy decisions and the economic shocks that defined his time at the central bank.

3News reported that seminars will open with an examination of the macroeconomic policies that drove Ghana's high growth rates in the earlier part of his tenure, including a major financial sector cleanup that saw the Bank of Ghana oversee the resolution of nine banks and 347 other financial institutions.

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The bank also introduced stronger capital and supervisory requirements aligned with Basel III standards during that period.

Subsequent sessions will take students through Ghana's policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic turbulence triggered by the Russia-Ukraine war.

Those external shocks arrived alongside a series of credit-rating downgrades that shut Ghana out of international capital markets, worsening a domestic liquidity and debt crisis that ultimately forced the country back into an IMF-supported programme and a significant debt restructuring exercise.

Gold Purchase Programme and IMF Recovery

Dr Addison is also expected to discuss the corrective steps taken during 2023 and 2024 to stabilise the economy, including the Domestic Gold Purchase Programme, which helped rebuild foreign exchange reserves, supported a recovery in the cedi's value, and contributed to faster progress towards debt sustainability targets under the IMF programme.

At Harvard, his firsthand account will allow students to examine how monetary and financial-sector policies shaped Ghana's economic trajectory over nearly a decade, and to explore the difficult trade-offs central banks face when simultaneously confronting inflation, financial instability, rising debt and repeated external shocks.

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His appointment situates Ghana's recent economic experience within a broader international policy conversation at one of the world's leading research institutions.

Source: YEN.com.gh