Head of Multilateral and Bilateral Trade at the Ministry of Trade and Industry, Mickson Opoku, the government will carry along the private sector in all strategic implementation committees leading up to the drafting of the National AfCFTA Implementation Plan, urging local producers and traders to take advantage of the market.
At a panel session of the National Technical Committee on the implementation processes so far at the Good Governance Africa stakeholder engagement forum on leveraging opportunities of the AfCFTA to boost Ghana’s economic growth, he stresses the need for the private sector to lead Ghana’s AfCFTA journey.
“You [private sector] will need to avail yourself as an industry to know some of these efforts by the government. The private sector must lead this trade agreement; the government’s role will be to provide the enabling environment with the right policies,” he says.Mr. Opoku reveals that effective trading under the AfCFTA may be more visible from October 2021, when the various regional economic communities submit their commitment offers for approval by the assembly of heads of states.
“Until then, we can also be engaging specific sectors telling them about some of the expectations,” he adds.Fechin Akoto, Assistant Commissioner, Tariffs and Trade, Customs Division, GRA, assures that Ghana has already aligned its import and export procedures to facilitate trading under the single market.
“We already have in place a tripartite arrangement comprising MoTI, GNCCI and GRA Customs working as a team to process documents for exports. We are starting with the registration of origin criteria of exporters,” he says.The Ghana Union of Trader Associations (GUTA) and the Ghana Association of Women Entrepreneurs (GAWE) part of the panel, tells the government to make information on the AfCFTA available to the private sector to enable them effectively take advantage of the market and to better educate informal sector businesses.
Clement Boateng, Vice President of GUTA, says: “SMEs make up about 80percent of businesses across Africa and they hold the key to the success of this AfCFTA project. Therefore, they must be engaged on every AfCFTA initiative from either the Secretariat or other stakeholders.”
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