Dropping the Debt in Ghana

The amount of debt in this world is rapidly rising and spreading. However, some countries have been facing this problem for a greater period of time. Ghana is a heavily indebted country and is gradually trying to redeem itself. A once proud nation and has been lost in the vast issue of debt that controls it. In the 15th Century the Portuguese arrived and found a large quantity of gold. After many years of being known as ‘Gold Coast’, this developing country became independent on 6th March, 1957 and was named Ghana. The Government wanted to invest money in industry, better living standards, education, health, dams and roads. All these improvements would help Ghana to expand faster. The only problem was that the country was not wealthy enough to complete these changes so they needed to borrow money. At the time, this did not need to cause concern, many countries took out loans and Ghana was offered low interest rates known as a soft loan. This meant less money was added to the original figure so Ghana would be losing a smaller amount. The government borrowed money from many different suppliers such as the World Bank, IMF, high street banks and even other governments. Repayments were going as expected until the 1970s when interest rates rapidly inflated. Ghana was now not getting the original interest rate offered and had to pay back more. This was soon followed by the price of cocoa, one of Ghana’s main exports, to fall. At this point Ghana was struggling as they were giving out more money than what was coming in.

Today the people of Ghana are suffering from the consequences of repaying so much debt. When governments in indebted countries spend over a ⅓ of their money paying off debt you can imagine the problems. One of which is education, even though the standards of schools has dropped the parents of pupils now have to pay for their Childs teaching. There might be only one teacher for over 50 students, occasionally when this teacher fails to attendant