With surging trade costs forcing countries to look within to find close substitutes, local producers and entrepreneurs must be able to assess and expand their capacity to better serve the regional and continental markets, says Emmanuel Doni-Kwame, Secretary-General of the International Chamber of Commerce Ghana (ICC-Ghana).
“For entrepreneurs, this is the best time as people tried to rebuild their economies and within Africa, since the disruption of global supply chains, this year people could not go to countries like China to import.
It brought to the fore that we have to start thinking of producing things ourselves as a result of the disruption in global supply chains,” he says.
Speaking to Single African Market he says the pandemic brought to the fore the idea of digitization, providing businesses with a way to go around the lack of infrastructure to connect digitally to trade.
“We just hope the AfCFTA can work on all the protocols that have to do with e-commerce and the ICC realizes that a lot of people are developing all kinds of digital platforms. We are working on global standards for the development of digital platforms, a voluntary global standard that others can use,” he shares.
Mr. Doni-Kwame again mentions that the ICC, through its centres of entrepreneurship, will groom Ghanaian businesses to understand the rudiments of international trade which, according to him, will enable them to identify and assess their key assets and to commercialize them.
“The training has more to do with international contracts involving state decisions and other parties, but the one that will be done will be run like a school on dispute resolution and that one will be for corporate bodies and then lawyers of SMEs,” he discloses.
Working with the UNDP, he mentions that his office has launched the ICC WIPO IP diagnostic tool which is available for SMEs for startups and all entrepreneurs to protect their IP assets, which is usually expensive. He says: “It has always been a problem for most entrepreneurs to protect their nice ideas. We’ve come up with a tool and we are the experts so we can run a lot of training programs for SMEs in that department.
Before you even go international, whatever you have, is an asset that needs to be protected managed, and be leveraged on.”
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