Establish Industrial Bank to address credit access difficulties – AGI tells government

The Association of Ghana Industries is calling for the establishment of an Industrial Bank to address difficulties of access to credit for its members.

According to the AGI’s Director of Business Development Services, the move will bode well for its members to take advantage of the implementation of the Africa Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) agreement.

John Opoku-Boateng told Citi Business News, “As l speak to you, we are still struggling with banks identifying projects that l think they should be able to support AGI with. As l speak, still we have business banks that are stuck because still in terms of risk assessment and so on and so forth they are not ready to give that amount of money for industry to thrive so that is a major problem.

“What the government has already said in the past, AGI wanted to come out with an industrial bank, fortunately, the government has said that, this is one of the plans that they intend to, so we are expecting the government to put together the industrial bank and when it is an industrial bank obviously then the policy and idea behind that will be to support industry,” he added.

Opoku-Boateng continued, “We are also envisaging as time goes on with the AfCFTA coming up, the banks will take the opportunity to actually give money to industries to actually upgrade and expand and for those who are having very credible products to be able to start their production.”

The Association of Ghana Industries (AGI) is the umbrella body that regulates the activities of industries in Ghana.

It also has over 1,200 members, made up of small, medium, and large-scale manufacturing and services industries across the country.