An official of the Ghana Investment Promotion Center (GIPC) has urged foreign investors seeking a foothold in African market to use Ghana as their springboard
Deputy Chief Executive Officer of GIPC,Yaw Amoateng Afriyie, made this call during opening of the PROPACK manufacturing, packaging and printing Conference and Exhibition which started on Tuesday.
Amoateng said Ghana’s enviable position as the Secretariat of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) offered a unique advantage for investors seeking a foothold in the continental free trade area.
“We are working to make the case to the international investor community to invest in Ghana first, grow in Ghana, and then springboard into the 1.4-billion-U.S. dollar African trading bloc that presents excellent returns for goods and services,” he urged.
Afriyie added, “The manufacturing sector is the country’s largest employer and can quickly bring informal workers into the formal economy. Therefore, we cannot overestimate the industrial sector’s transformational good for Ghana.”
He, therefore, underscored the need to attract more investment into the sector through fiscal and other incentives to make the country’s industrial sector attractive and friendly to investors.
“Although, in recent years, Greenfield foreign direct investment– the most desirable type of inward investment – has fallen, we at the GIPC contend that this is the inspiration to recalibrate and look within for innovative policy and financing solutions to support private sector growth,” said the official.
In line with that, Afriyie added that the government was working hard to ensure that “companies already here, that risk capital to invest in Ghana, get the necessary support. We believe that the companies you have in your market present more significant opportunities for reinvestment than those we are actively courting.”
The PROPACK Ghana Conference and Exhibition which lasts till Thursday is being organized by the Montgomery Group, a global events company, with packaging, processing, printing, and plastics companies from China, India, Europe, America, and Africa participating.
