The rate of inflation in Ghana for April 2024 has slowed to 25.0% despite a spike in Month on Month inflation according to figures from the Ghana Statistical Service.

Prices of goods and services between March 2023 and March 2024 had gone up by 25.8%, although the monthly rate of price changes have slowed from 2.0% as at January 2024 to 0.8% as at March 2024.

But despite prices of food and services in the Month of April rising by 1.8%, highest since January 2024, headline inflation between April 2023 and April 2024 dropped by some 0.8%, to 25.0%.

Head of the Ghana Statistical Service, Professor Samuel Annim has attributed the slowdown to the fall in the inflation of food items, whose April 2024 figure of 26.8% is the lowest in 13 months and a significant drop in the 29.6% recorded for March 2024.

Non-food items however had taken the opposite trend, rising from the 22.6% it recorded for March 2024, to 23.5% in April.

Meanwhile, alcoholic beverages, tobacco and narcotics, restaurants and accommodation services, personal care, social protection, health, recreation, sports and culture, housing electricity, gas and other fuels and food and non-alcoholic beverages are items divisions that recorded inflation higher than the national average of 25.0%.

The country’s inflation rate is calculated by collecting approximately 47,800 products from some 57 markets across the 16 regions of the country.

The latest inflation figure is expected to be a key factor, when the Bank of Ghana’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) meets later this month to decide on a possible review of the country’s policy rate which currently stands at 29.0%