A five-day workshop on illicit financial flows (IFFs) ended on Friday, September 5, 2025 in Accra with a call for structural reforms, institutional collaboration, and sustained investment to protect Ghana’s economy from resource leakages. 
The programme examined the scale and drivers of illicit financial flows and brought together policymakers, statisticians, law enforcement agencies, civil society, academia, and development partners.
In her closing remarks, the Director-General of the National Development Planning Commission (NDPC), Dr. Audrey Smock Amoah, said the findings of the Ghana Macroeconomic and Trade Structure Report revealed an estimated 160 billion US dollars in cumulative inflows and outflows between 2013 and 2023. She described this as a major drain on the economy, representing resources that could have been invested in schools, hospitals, and infrastructure.
She outlined four pillars for tackling the problem. They were structural reforms to diversify exports and modernize customs and tax administration, stronger institutional cohesion through an inter-agency task force, legal and regulatory modernization including beneficial ownership registers and stronger transfer pricing rules, and the political will to ensure enforcement. 
She emphasised that addressing illicit financial flows was vital to safeguarding Ghana’s sovereignty and securing its development future.
Dr. Owusu Kagya, Director of Business, Industry and Trade Directorate at the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS), delivering a statement on behalf of the Government Statistician, highlighted key challenges in implementation and measurement. These included limited technical capacity, inadequate comparable data for benchmarking, and weak institutional coordination.
He stressed that addressing such gaps required coordinated national and international collaboration, sustained investment in human and institutional capacity, and embedding IFF measurement into the national statistical system.
He further noted the need to build capacity for regular reporting on Sustainable Development Goal indicator 16.4.1 and called for sustainable financing to support this effort. 
He added that the GSS had initiated work to expand statistics to cover trade in services in addition to merchandise trade, providing a more comprehensive basis for policy analysis.
Both NDPC and GSS urged participants to sustain the momentum beyond the workshop by translating the findings and action plan into tangible reforms, stronger enforcement mechanisms, and smarter policies capable of reducing debt distress, expanding fiscal space, and financing Ghana’s development priorities