Seth Twum Akwaboah, Chief Executive of the Association of Ghana Industries, stressed the importance of expanding Ghana’s raw material base beyond agriculture to boost manufacturing, create jobs, and drive economic growth.
He pointed out that increasing value addition is essential for manufacturing to make a meaningful contribution to GDP, cautioning that basic processing and packaging do not create enough employment.
Mr. Akwaboah also identified key challenges, including limited access to finance, high raw material costs, and expensive electricity, emphasizing that tackling these issues is critical for industrial development.
Mr. Twum Akwaboah emphasized that a stable economy is crucial for business growth and highlighted the importance of predictable inflation, exchange rates, and taxes.
“We need to look at our material base. It’s not just agricultural products. Some other products as well. The thing is, when we are talking manufacturing, if you really want manufacturing to contribute to job creation and value addition and contribute a lot more to your GDP, you need to develop the raw material base such, that the level of value addition or the standard value addition is very high. Manufacturing grows at different levels.
Of course, today nobody does the entire manufacturing. When we come to cars for example, people produce parts and others assemble. We produce a particular part, but the thing is the state to which you add value. So if it is 50% value addition, it is good.
If it’s 60, it’s even better. If it’s 70 and 80, very good. But if you do 10%, all you do is just packaging. You bring the materials almost at a finished state and you package. The value addition is very little.
And therefore, you may say you are manufacturing, but you are not adding much. And you don’t need too many people to employ at that level. But where you are taking the boost from the farms, cleaning, processing, and then packaging, then you know that every step, every state of the chain, we have a lot more people employed. And that’s where we make a lot more contribution. Remember that all these who are employed, they are also contributing taxes.
And we are getting so many other values. And therefore, if we want to support manufacturing, then let’s look at deepening the remedies. And a lot of the basic materials we process, we export in raw form. So it’s a big challenge. So that is one area that we need to look at.
Then we can talk about other factors like access to finance, the cost of carbon, and then the electricity issues.”
