IPAs to optimize opportunities to sell African countries for FDIs - Yofi Grant

The formation of Investment Promotion Agencies (IPAs) will help African countries leverage opportunities to sell their countries to attract Foreign Direct Investments (FDIs), the Chief Executive Officer of Ghana Investment Promotion Center, Yofi Grant has said.

According to him, the association will ensure the standardization of some practices, increase the quality of service, and be well-positioned to be in the face of investors at all times.

Speaking to the media on the sidelines of the African IPAs capacity building conference in Accra on Monday, October 30, 2023, Yofi Grant said all the red flags highlighted in some countries such as no clear mandate, inability to market their countries, among others would be resolved.

The GIPC CEO said, "We realized that many of them are operating outside the fray of government policy which makes it difficult for them for them to mobilize capital, so under our leadership, we want to form the African Investment Promotion Association where all the IPAs from countries in Africa come together to form a self-government association to increase quality and standardize some of our practices and ensure that we can optimize the opportunity given us to sell our countries to Foreign Direct Investors."

Narrowing the scope to Ghana, he stated that many FDIs have been attracted to the manufacturing sector.

Yofi Grant said a lot of investments have also been made in the services sector.

"The policy orientation that we had to change the structure of the economy is value addition and manufacturing has been very useful so we are seeing quite a number of small-scale manufacturers coming into Ghana. There’s been relatively a lot of investment in services. What for us is a bigger concern is to diversify the opportunities from the urban areas in the cities to probably the other sessions of the size of the economy," he said.

The mission of Investment Promotion Agencies is to attract investment to a country and their core functions are; image building of FDI hosting country, investment generation, project management and aftercare services.

They are however a non-profit organization.

SA/NOQ

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