What the Government Needs to Do Before Scrapping Minimum Capital Requirements for Investments

The government’s proposal to scrap minimum capital requirements for investment entry has been met with cautious optimism. On the surface, it signals a liberal, pro-business stance—removing artificial barriers that deter both local entrepreneurs and foreign investors. Fewer restrictions on the movement of goods, services, labor, and capital usually translate into more dynamism and growth.

But before the champagne corks fly, Ghana must pause and do the groundwork. A policy that simply throws open the gates without strategic preparation risks flooding the economy with activity that may enrich a few but strip the nation of the chance to transform its resources into real, broad-based prosperity.

The Strategic Sectors Question

There are three pillars of Ghana’s economic survival—cocoa, gold, and oil. These sectors have for decades remained both the pride and the curse of our economy: too much dependency, too little value addition. Before scrapping capital requirements, government must establish strong, innovative local structuring around these industries.

Imagine cocoa not as sacks shipped raw to Europe but as clusters of processing plants, SMEs making chocolates, cosmetics, beverages, and fertilizers from by-products. Imagine gold not just mined and exported but refined locally, feeding jewelry clusters and high-tech industries. Imagine oil beyond crude sales, driving petrochemical zones and fertilizer hubs.

Without these clusters, open-door investment only deepens extraction without transformation—more foreign companies swooping in, more raw exports, less value at home.

The Innovation Imperative

Scrapping minimum capital requirements should not be about easing rent-seeking in real estate or speculative trading. It must be tied to innovation in key sectors. If government ties investment liberalization to innovation-led programs—funding for research, hubs for small-scale industrialization, digitization of supply chains—then Ghana could unleash millions of local businesses.

This is especially urgent because informal exploitation—galamsey in gold, smuggling in cocoa, unregulated drilling in oil—thrives in the absence of structured, innovative local ecosystems. Left unchecked, removing capital requirements could incentivize even more destructive exploitation. With the right innovative frameworks, however, these same sectors can become engines of formalized, sustainable growth.

Guardrails Before Liberalization

If government is serious, here is what must precede scrapping minimum capital requirements:

1. Sectoral Clusters – Formal hubs around cocoa, gold, and oil to channel investments productively.
2. SME Support Systems – Incubation, financing, and technical assistance to help local businesses compete once capital restrictions fall.
3. Regulatory Readiness – Strong monitoring institutions to prevent a new wave of environmental degradation and illicit financial flows.
4. Innovation Incentives – Tax breaks, R&D grants, and industrial policy that prioritize innovation-led businesses, not speculative ventures.
5. Inclusive Access – Special mechanisms to ensure women, youth, and informal sector actors are not pushed aside by big players when the doors are opened.

A Cautionary Note

The scrapping of minimum capital requirements should not become another hollow reform, applauded in principle but disastrous in practice. If Ghana gets this wrong, we will be handing over our economy wholesale to external forces, watching our resources fly out again while our people remain trapped in poverty.

If we get it right, however, this could mark the beginning of an economy driven not just by free movement of capital, but by structured transformation, innovation, and local value creation.

The choice, as always, lies with the leadership—and with how loudly the rest of us insist that this be done properly.