Ghana foreign direct investment outpaces Nigeria per head, Carthena analysis finds 

Wole Ogundare, Founder and Managing Partner of Carthena Advisory, sets Ghana’s recovery from its 2022 default against Nigeria’s scale and argues the two are running different races. One is decided by what a unit of output costs to make, the other by everything an investor must price around it. 

In April 2026 Ghana sold a seven-year bond into its own domestic market, its first issue since the debt exchange of 2023. Wole Ogundare, Founder and Managing Partner of Carthena Advisory, reads that sale as the moment the sovereign became investable again on its own account, and builds a wider argument about African capital allocation on top of it.

The reversal behind the sale is documented across Ghana’s own indicators, which Carthena draws from the IMF, Fitch Ratings, the Bank of Ghana and the Ghana Statistical Service. Inflation peaked above 54 per cent in December 2022 and reached 3.2 per cent in March 2026, the lowest reading in twenty-eight years. Public debt, near 93 per cent of GDP at the default, is on a path to 46 per cent by 2027 after falling twenty-one percentage points during 2025. The economy expanded 6.0 per cent in 2025 and 6.4 per cent in the first quarter of 2026. Reserves reached 12.3 billion dollars, up 5.4 billion in a year. The primary balance closed 2025 in surplus at 2.9 per cent of GDP. In July 2026 the International Monetary Fund completed the programme in full and moved Ghana onto a non-financing instrument.

Ogundare is careful about what that cost. The 2023 domestic debt exchange fell on local bondholders, pension funds and ordinary savers, who took real losses so the sovereign could restore its solvency, and the fiscal consolidation that followed carried an electoral price in a country where austerity always does. None of it produced a signing photograph or a summit headline.

Independent institutions have since ratified the turnaround. Fitch moved Ghana from Restricted Default to B with a positive outlook by May 2026, citing the debt reduction, the consolidation and the rebuilt reserves, and S&P has the sovereign at B minus. Lending rates fell from 27.4 per cent to 16.3 per cent in a year, the ninety-one-day Treasury bill yields under five per cent, and the current account ran a surplus of 7.9 per cent of GDP in 2025.

Ogundare states the counter-argument at its strongest before answering it. On the narrow cost of producing a unit of output, Nigeria often wins. A domestic market of 220 million dilutes fixed costs across a volume Ghana cannot match, abundant gas gives large manufacturers cheap captive power, and a devalued currency has made labour and local inputs cheap in dollar terms. A cement plant in Nigeria can carry a lower factory-gate cost than the same plant in Ghana, and Carthena concedes it.

His answer is that foreign direct investment is a discounted cash flow decision, in which the unit cost of production is one input among several. Against it sit the questions an investment committee actually asks. Whether dividends declared in year three can be repatriated in year four, and how long the queue runs. What premium to apply to a currency capable of moving thirty per cent in a year. What it costs in money and in weeks to move a container off the dock and to the factory. Nigerian ports clear cargo in about thirteen days against a four-day global norm, and Carthena cites the Nigerian Shippers’ Council record showing roughly sixty per cent of Nigeria’s own imports clearing through the ports of Ghana, Togo and Benin.

Scale plays on both sides of the ledger. The 220 million people who dilute fixed costs for a Nigerian manufacturer are the same 220 million dividing the country’s power stations and its ports. A Nigerian consumes about 150 kilowatt hours of electricity a year against more than twice that in Ghana, the gap on installed generating capacity per person is close to threefold, and because Nigeria delivers roughly a third of what it has installed, the difference in reliable power reaching a factory floor is wider again.

The capital has already registered all of it. On UNCTAD’s numbers Ghana attracted about 54 dollars of foreign direct investment a head in 2025 against Nigeria’s 17, at a seventh of the population, and Nigeria’s figure is flattered by a single two-billion-dollar oil financing. Cumulative stock per person, the money that came and stayed, stands at roughly 1,440 dollars in Ghana against 400 in Nigeria.

Ogundare’s lesson for Nigeria is about sequence. The scale is a genuine asset no serious strategy would trade away, and Ghana’s example is not one to copy but one to read in order. He sets a test he is willing to be judged on, watching Ghana for a stall in disinflation or a reversal of the primary surplus, neither of which appears in the current data, and watching Nigeria for what changes in power supply, currency repatriation and port clearance in the weeks before the next set of memoranda is announced. His summary of the difference runs to five words. “Ghana is doing the work.”