Three years of Ghana’s oil production has been very eventful. With more than 100 million barrels of crude oil already exported, oil has overtaken cocoa as the second largest export commodity of Ghana. Oil contributed to unprecedented growth in Ghana’s GDP in 2011; whilst from 2011 – 2013 Ghana was the third largest recipient of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in Africa largely on account of oil investment. Ghana has so far received over US$2 billion from its share of crude oil.

But with production expected to increase as a result of new developments and new discoveries, experts and citizens are already looking back to how early oil revenues have been managed so far. On this journey of reflection, the Africa Centre for Energy Policy (ACEP) in a new report titled “Three Years of Petroleum Revenue Management in Ghana – Transparency without Accountability”, has explored a number of questions on how Ghana managed its oil money over the last three years. Whether Ghana so far received what is due it from oil? Whether the government has invested the oil money efficiently? And whether the Government complied with the strict restrictions on the utilization of oil money?

The Report also covered key issues about petroleum revenue management highlighted in the 2011 and 2012 Reports of the Public Interest and Accountability Committee (PIAC); the 2010/2011 Ghana Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (GHEITI) Reconciliation Report and the 2013 ACEP Report on Value for money of Projects Funded with Oil Revenues.