Ghana has called on the ECOWAS Bank for Investment and Development (EBID).to fundamentally transform its scale and approach, as President John Dramani Mahama urged the region to “reset” how it finances development, and the country’s Finance Minister warned that most member states have failed to honour binding capital commitments to the institution.
The messages, delivered at EBID’s 24th Annual General Meeting in Accra, combined to set an ambitious tone for a bank that reported strong operational results in 2025 but which its host country’s leadership believes must evolve far beyond its current footprint to meet West Africa’s development challenge.
Dr. Cassiel Ato Baah Forson, Ghana’s Finance Minister and outgoing Chairman of the EBID Board of Governors, opened the session with a frank account of an outstanding governance problem.
A 2022 Board decision had raised EBID’s authorised capital to US$3.4 billion and called a third tranche of subscriptions worth US$411.4 million, with a December 2025 deadline for full payment. That deadline has passed with the obligation largely unmet.
“To date, only four member states — namely, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, and Togo — have fully met their obligations,” Dr. Forson told governors.
More Read
“While US$102.5 million was received in 2025, outstanding arrears still stand at approximately $256 million,” he added.
Being candid in the implications, he further stated: “Timely capital payments are critical. It strengthens EBID’s leverage and sustains its growth and impact across our region.”
The Finance Minister also offered a frank assessment of the operating environment EBID had navigated in 2025, describing the global economy as having been defined by what he called a “Great Wedge”, a divergence in growth dynamics driven by surging artificial intelligence investment in advanced economies set against persistent trade volatility and elevated geopolitical tensions elsewhere.
“For an institution like ours, this translated into a complex operating environment, with divergent inflationary pressures across our member states,” he said.
Against that backdrop, Dr. Forson said the Bank had delivered. “EBID did not just weather the storm — we rose above it.”
The balance sheet expanded from US$1.97 billion in 2024 to US$2.39 billion by end-2025, while profitability rose from $8.55 million to US$9.75 million, a 13.3 percent increase.
Project approvals rose by 50 percent and commitments surged by over 83 percent to US$813.77 million, with a concentrated focus on energy and transport infrastructure.
EBID President Dr. George Agyekum Donkor provided the operational detail as new disbursements in 2025 amounted to US$722 million, a 47.7 percent increase on the prior year, raising the Bank’s annual disbursement rate to approximately 26.5 percent from 20.4 percent in 2024.
The Bank appraised 25 projects worth US$1.4 billion during the year — a 55.81 percent increase in value on 2024, and mobilised over US$510 million and €310 million in resources from partners.
Dr. Donkor outlined EBID’s Growth, Resilience and Optimisation (GRO) Strategy for 2026–2030, anchored on growth, resilience and optimisation, committing to directing at least 63 percent of new commitments toward private enterprises and dedicating over 41 percent of resources to climate mitigation and social development.
The Bank is working toward strategic partnerships with the African Development Bank (AfDB) and the Arab Bank for Economic Development in Africa, moves Donkor described as potentially transformative for EBID’s credit standing and resource mobilisation capacity.
The institutional progress, however, was framed by the Ghanaian delegation as a floor rather than a ceiling. President Mahama, representing Ghana at the AGM through his Presidential Advisor on the Economy, Seth Terkper (as the President was in Lyon for the 2026 One Health Summit) called in his prepared remarks for a fundamental “reset” in how West Africa finances its transformation.
The bank, Mr. Mahama said, must evolve “from a supporting bank to a systems-driven bank” and move “from modest billions into the upper balance of billions of dollars.”
Capital must be realigned to move from a bank of support to a bank of scale, his remarks stated, with West Africa’s transformation financed increasingly from within the region.
Mr. Terkper, used his own remarks to make the case for domestic capital mobilisation. He pointed to municipal and local-currency bonds as underutilised instruments, and called for private capital to be crowded in through deeper partnerships with regional stock exchanges and leading local companies.
The argument carried weight partly because of its source, as Ghana completed a sovereign debt restructuring in 2023 following a near-catastrophic fiscal crisis, an experience Mr. Terkper appeared to reference when he told the assembly, “the time to prepare for crisis is when the times are good.”
The stakes of getting the financing model right are not in dispute. West Africa’s annual infrastructure financing gap was estimated at between US$20 billion and US$36 billion as of 2022 , a figure that has widened since as climate, energy transition and digital connectivity demands have grown.
Governments across the region have historically depended on international development partners to fund infrastructure projects, often because large shares of national budgets are committed to recurrent expenditure, leaving limited room for capital investment.
Dr. Forson, in a direct charge to his fellow governors, said Ghana remained fully committed to supporting EBID in fulfilling its mandate.
“The future we seek will only be built by deliberate and collective action. Our discussions here in Accra will be rigorous, and they must be, because we are here to make decisions that will shape the economic future of our Bank and West Africa. The expectations of our citizens are high. They look to us for results,” he noted.
The 24th AGM was held in Accra. Ghana holds the chair of the EBID Board of Governors, with Forson having been appointed to the position at the 23rd session in Banjul in April 2025.
