As I indicated in my last press briefing on 9th May, 2021, the bank will be launched in July 2021 as part of one of the core pillars of the GHC100 billion Ghana CARES program which aims to achieve the following:
- Economic transformation that requires that entrepreneurs in key productive sectors have access to long-term finance at affordable interest rates. Analysis done as part of the background technical work for establishing DBG found that in Ghana, agriculture and manufacturing receive around 4 and 8 percent also respectively in bank lending, and only about 15 percent of bank loans exceed 5 years in tenure.
- The launch of DBG this year, will address fundamental financing constraints. It will provide loans with tenures of up to 15 years, with a focus on key transformational sectors—agribusiness, manufacturing, ITC, tourism, and housing.
- DBG will be a wholesale bank lending to commercial banks and to non-bank financial institutions such as Venture Capital and Private Equity on infrastructure focus to on-lend to SMEs and provide equity capital.
- DBG will also operate Partial Guarantee windows, and also a Digital Platform to facilitate SME financing at a derisked rate to reduce interest rates.
- Government, learning from our national experience and also from global experiences regarding development banks, is determined to set up DBG so that it stands the test of time and supports Ghana’s economic transformation on a long-term basis. To this end, Government is taking extraordinary measures to ensure that DBG is well capitalized, and it has a strong and independent governance structure—including competitive international recruitment of its Board and Senior Management--to enable it to be run professionally and on a financially sustainable basis without recurrent recourse to the public purse.
- DBG should in short order be able to use its balance sheet support to leverage private sector funds in international markets.