Two bodies to promote export of Ghanaian services

Accra, March 3, GNA - The Ghana Export Promotion Council in collaboration with the International Trade Centre is initiating steps to promote the export of Ghanaian services.

Speaking in an interview with the Ghana News Agency (GNA) at the on-going 10th Ghana International Trade Fair in Accra, Mr Edmund Opoku-Agyeman, Senior Expert Development Officer of the GEPC said the process had started with series of training and education programmes for the local professional bodies in the country.

He said so far training programmes to promote networking were organised for professionals such as members of the Ghana Association of Consultants, Institute of Freight Forwarders, Institute of Planners and the Ghana Institute of Architects.

Mr Opoku-Agyeman said: "Besides that in the interim, the Council is planning to assist some local service providers to get to the ECOWAS sub-regional market and the freight forwarders have the opportunities of using the ports.

We are trying to map out a programme for the service providers and the Council is looking forward to facilitate some Ghanaian service firms to participate in the upcoming Tunisia Trade Fair in June this year." Mr Opoku-Agyeman said within the context of ECOWAS, Ghana's competitive urge laid in the construction and its allied engineering services and given countries like Sierra Leone and Liberia coming out of wars, there were lots of opportunities for Ghana to explore. Currently, he said, a lot of exports that were not regulated and people did not even know that when they offered services in a foreign country to their clients they were engaging in the export of those services.

Statistically, the senior export officer said it was difficult to track the data on exports of Ghanaian services, "If a Ghanaian consultant does a job via the Internet at his office for a foreign client it is difficult to track it." 03 March 06