IN SHORT: Ghana has formally ended the use of physical cheques across its entire public sector. The Controller and Accountant-General’s Department signed a Service Level Agreement on March 25 with the Bank of Ghana and 24 commercial banks, making the integrated GHIPSS electronic payment platform the only legally authorised channel for all government transactions. Every ministry, department, agency, and district assembly must now comply.
Ghana has signed a landmark Service Level Agreement with the Bank of Ghana and 24 commercial banks that formally bans physical cheques from all public sector transactions, integrating the Ghana Interbank Payment and Settlement Systems with the Ghana Integrated Financial Management Information System into a single fully interoperable Electronic Funds Transfer platform. The agreement, signed on March 25, 2026 in Accra, makes electronic payments the only legally authorised channel for all transactions by Ministries, Departments, Agencies, and Metropolitan, Municipal, and District Assemblies nationwide.
- Controller and Accountant-General Kwasi Agyei described the signing as the end of a long-overdue structural correction, saying: “For far too long the public sector has relied on manual cheque book systems that are slow, difficult to reconcile and prone to inefficiencies and misuse. That era must end now.”
- The GHIPSS Instant Payment gateway becomes the sole authorised channel for all government payments, with GIFMIS providing the centralised oversight and auditable trail across all covered entities.
- Ghana Association of Banks CEO John Awuah said the nationwide rollout will ensure every cedi transacted on the platform remains fully traceable.
- The reform aligns with the Public Financial Management Act 2016 (Act 921), its 2025 amendments, and the Treasury Single Account framework, which already designate GIFMIS as the mandatory platform for all public financial management.
- Deputy Finance Minister Thomas Nyarko Ampem said the reform’s commitment control mechanism had already proven its value: it prevented the purchase of over 1 billion Ghana cedis ($65 million) worth of vehicles last year by ensuring procurements stayed within budget.
- The transition will be phased but compliance is described as non-negotiable, with structured training and change management to support MDAs and MMDAs through the switchover.
Ghana has been building toward this moment for over a year. The CAGD first announced a Q1 2026 deadline in November 2025 at a stakeholder meeting with commercial bank managing directors, giving the banking sector four months to prepare integration. The March 25 signing of the SLA converts that timeline commitment into a legal obligation across 24 institutions simultaneously, with the Bank of Ghana’s regulatory authority behind enforcement.
The Bigger Picture: The elimination of government cheques is not primarily a technology story. It is a governance story. Manual cheques in public sector payment systems create three specific vulnerabilities: they can be issued without real-time commitment controls, reconciled late or inaccurately, and intercepted or falsified between issuance and encashment. The GIFMIS-GHIPSS integration closes all three simultaneously. The Deputy Finance Minister’s figure of 1 billion cedis in prevented vehicle procurement is the clearest demonstration of what commitment controls achieve in practice. Scaled across every ministry, agency, and district assembly in Ghana, the transparency and fiscal discipline gains are structural, not incremental. For investors and development finance institutions operating in Ghana, a public sector that transacts entirely on auditable electronic rails is a materially lower-risk counterparty.
Source: Ghana Business News / Graphic Online
