Ghana’s oil and gas sector scored 78 out of 100 points in the 2021 Resource Governance Index (RGI), improving by 11 points since the 2017 RGI. Strengthened resource governance is underpinned by improvements across both the index’s value realization and revenue management components.
Highlights
• Ghana’s oil and gas sector’s move into the “good” performance band in the 2021 RGI is driven by improvements in the governance of licensing and national budgeting along with continued improvements of the state-owned Ghana National Petroleum Company (GNPC) and the Ghana Stabilization Fund, the country’s sovereign wealth fund.
• Adoption of new laws regarding licensing and national budgeting strengthened Ghana’s extractives legal framework and helped drive the 2021 RGI score increase.
• Both law and practice scores increased, but the difference between them widens from -7 to -22, signaling a worrying “implementation gap.”
• GNPC improved its performance through commodity sales disclosures, but areas for future improvement include the timeliness of disclosures and aspects of corporate governance.
• The Ghana Stabilization Fund scored a full 100 points on governance, owing to new disclosures of assets and asset classes.
• Ghana’s oil and gas sector outperformed the older gold mining sector owing to enhanced transparency and accountability in the oil and gas sector legislative framework.
