The International Finance Corporation (IFC) gathered Ghana’s main development partners in Accra this week to align their environmental, social and governance (ESG) work and reduce duplication across the financial sector.
The roundtable drew the World Bank Group, German development agencies GIZ and KfW, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and Switzerland’s State Secretariat for Economic Affairs, among others. Yewande Giwa, IFC senior country officer for Ghana, said the partners are chasing the same outcome through separate programmes, which leaves clear room to join up. “We all have the same goal, but we are implementing different activities,” she said.
Much of the discussion turned on a change in how risk is read: that environmental and social problems now land directly on company balance sheets. Damilola Sobo Smith, an environmental and social risk management specialist at IFC, said compliance breaches, poor waste handling and operational disruptions can erode profit, damage reputation and threaten a firm’s ability to keep trading.
That message builds on rules already in force. The Bank of Ghana launched the Ghana Sustainable Banking Principles in 2019 after a two year process backed by IFC, and all 24 commercial banks signed on. In November 2024 the central bank went further, directing regulated lenders to disclose climate related financial risks in their audited accounts, turning what had been voluntary practice into a reporting obligation.
IFC says its Integrated ESG Programme is helping firms adopt international environmental and social standards while supporting the Bank of Ghana to put the banking principles into practice across lending and governance. The work is funded by Switzerland, which has partnered IFC in Ghana for more than a decade.
Magdalena Wüst, deputy head of cooperation at the Swiss embassy, said a sound financial sector underpins investment, business growth and jobs, and that long running partnerships of this kind help build institutions that endure.
Participants closed with a commitment to coordinate more closely, with IFC casting the meeting as a step toward joint action rather than parallel efforts.
