The government’s quest to raise earnings from the non-traditional export (NTE) sector to US$5 billion through the new National Export Strategy (NES) has suffered a major setback.
This follows the inability of some of the country’s donor partners to honour their pledges towards the programme.
In 2012 the total non-traditional export revenue was US$2.364 billion. This rose marginally to US2.436 billion in 2013 and US$2.514 billion in 2014.
As a result of the potential in the sector, the government was anticipating that the donors, numbering more than 10, would support the strategy with funds to help empower the private sector to invest more in the NTE sector, where earnings have been growing at an average of 15 per cent per annum.
Their contributions were to complement allocations from the Export Trade, Agriculture and Industrial Funds (EDAIF) that would form the pool of funds to be used by an implementation secretariat, responsible for turning the NES into an action plan.
As of February 12, however, none of those contributions had come in, almost four years after the strategy was launched.
“The thinking was that EDAIF will do a lot but they are also saying that they have funding issues. The donors are also failing,” a government source said.
“For now, we are just there, not knowing what to do,” the source added.
MoTI responds
Reacting to the development, the Director of Exports at the Ministry of Trade and Industry, Mr Gerald Nyarko-Mensah, said the ministry had begun talks with some development partners to see which part of the programme they would be able to support financially or technically.
“We originally had our eyes on EDAIF but the quantum of their funding would not be sufficient for the programme so we are looking at other sources to add to the current funds,” he noted.
So far, he said the United State Agency for International Development (USAID) had expressed interest to support the implementation with their US Africa Partnership Project, which Ghana is part.
“They have tagged four specific areas to support within the next two years and when all these come on board, it would help towards the attainment of the export strategy,” he said.
NES implementation
Mr Nyarko-Mensah explained that his outfit was undertaking preparatory works towards the full implementation of the strategy on a yet-to-be disclosed date.
First was the inauguration of the steering committee early last year. The committee then held several meetings to endorse the broad framework plans that had then been prepared. Those plans looked at the actual work plans and the annual budget.
The second layer was the inter-institutional coordinating committee comprising mostly the stakeholder institutions more like a technical working group that was also put together and inaugurated.
The third layer looked at the operational level, it took place within the Ghana Export Promotion (GEP) which they had already put in place a programme coordinator.
“What the ministry did was to have them appoint dedicated staff for each of the eleven priority products which we call “Product Leaders”, we orientated them and they have now actively taken part with the preparation of the day-to-day work plans budget,” he noted.
Decentralisation
Explaining further, he said the ministry spent greater part of last year to decentralised the programme as it is one of the major objective of the strategy to attain an equitable distribution of the export efforts.
According to him, this would ensure that each district produces a flagship product which would be developed as the district export product, he also stated that the product could be more than one.
“We have gone round and met with all the districts in the country, held orientation and workshops with the people to make them aware of the existence of this strategy and where the country wants to go. We also discussed with them to try and figure out what would be the best approach to structure district level governance,” he said.
Mr Mensah said his outfit intended that a district export committees be established and would be the ones to drive the export activities at the district level.
He said they met with the district coordinating directors and their planning officers at every regional capital to orient and sensitise them to the strategy.
Source: Graphic