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Governor of the Central Bank of Ghana, Dr. Ernest Addison, has hinted that plans are underway to soon phase out the GH₵1 and GH₵2 notes from the Ghanaian economy.
According to him, the notes are expensive in printing and are rendered incapable of being processed by its machines after circulating over a period.
“The GH¢1 note and GH¢2 note would eventually be phased out because they are not cost-effective in terms of the printing cost.
“They circulate very widely and come back very torn and soiled, and they are very difficult for our currency processing machines to process, ” he said on Monday, September 27, 2021.
The notes, he said, will be replaced with their respective coins which are the GH₵1 and GH₵2 coins.
“You will recall that the GH¢2 note was issued as a commemorative note. So commemorative notes are not notes that we will continue to print and therefore what we have done in the last two years is to introduce the GH¢2 coins, and you would expect that, eventually, it would more or less play the role that the GH¢2 note is playing”, he added.
Ghana currently has GH¢1, GH¢2, GH¢5, GH¢10, GH¢20, GH¢50, GH¢100 and GH¢200 in notes while one pesewa, 10 pesewas, 20 pesewas, 50 pesewas, one cedi and two cedis are coins.
The Bank of Ghana in 2018 spent over GH¢153 million to print the country’s legal tender, the cedi.
The amount included the actual cost of printing the Ghana cedi, fees paid to the agency that supervised the printing process, as well as what the central bank described as other currency expenses.
The Government of Ghana also spent some $8.97 million on printing the new 100 and 200 cedis notes, which were introduced in November 2019.
Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta, who was responding to questions on the process in Parliament in March 2020 said: “This is made up of $4.45 million and $4.53 million for the GHS100 and GHS200 notes respectively”.
