On 1 July 2007 Ghana knocked four zeros off its currency. Ten thousand old cedis (¢) became one Ghana cedi (GH¢), and the pesewa came back as a hundredth of it.
Nothing about anyone’s wealth changed. A price of ¢20,000 became GH¢2, and a salary was divided by the same number. What changed was that ordinary transactions stopped needing five and six figures.
Older Ghanaians still occasionally quote the old money — “twenty thousand” for two cedis — the way people elsewhere quote pre-decimal currency. If a figure seems absurd by a factor of about ten thousand, this is why.
It matters for anyone reading data. Long-run series are usually expressed in today’s cedis all the way back, so the 1960s appear as fractions of a pesewa, and a multiple calculated across the change is arithmetic on two different units. Ghana also changed currency once before, in 1965, from the Ghanaian pound to the cedi.