The Africa Centre for Energy Policy (ACEP), OXFAM, and the Friends of the Nation (FoN) have launched a campaign to ensure that adequate resources were allocated to the agriculture and education sectors to propel the country’s growth.
Dubbed: “Promoting Sustained Funding for Agriculture and Education in Ghana,” the campaign was to drum home the need for more of the oil fund to be infused into agriculture development, in particular, to enable the country cut down on importation.
It came out of a research conducted on how the petroleum revenue was benefiting others to the detriment of agriculture and education sectors.
Mr Benjamin Boakye, the Executive Director of ACEP, said infusing more of the oil fund into agriculture would put more money in the pockets of farmers to reduce poverty.
He hinted that Ghana still lagged behind in terms of research, training, technology and, therefore, urged the Ministry of Finance to critically pay attention to the agriculture sector.
“With education, the country had met some international obligations with consistent attention to the sector since 1995 but not without the challenges of teaching and learning materials and infrastructure,” Mr Boakye said.
Meanwhile, Ghana passed the Petroleum Management Act 2011 (Act 815) to provide the framework to manage petroleum revenues after commercial production began in 2010.
The Act prescribes allocation of a portion of petroleum revenue to budgetary support through the Annual Budget Funding Amount.
Further, the Act requires the prioritisation of a maximum of four areas for ABFA funding. The priority areas are relevant to maximise the rate of economic development and promote opportunities to ensure the wellbeing of all citizens.
Mr Charles Gyamfi Ofori, who presented the research findings, said achieving the objective required investments in the priority areas as oil revenues acted as additional funds to existing development finance efforts of the government in those areas.
For almost a decade, physical infrastructure and service delivery in education and agriculture modernisation had featured as priority areas for ABFA allocation, he said.
“While it is important to assess the impact of petroleum revenue on all the prioritised sectors that received petroleum revenue, this study focused on the education and agriculture sectors,” Mr Ofori said, because they had the capacity to significantly contribute to economic diversification and provide human capital for economic growth.
Source: GNA
