We’re focused on building giant industries – Chamber of Commerce President

The president of the Ghana National Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GNCCI) Clement Osei-Amoako is rallying support from industry players to ‘build giants across all the regions’ across the country.

Mr. Osei-Amoako, who has been elevated from 1st Vice President of the chamber to the president said every region has its own comparative advantage “so we are looking at the situation whereby we bring the business at the doorstep of every region so that it will not be centralized in Accra”

He made this known in an interview with Starr FM on the sideline of a stakeholder engagement held in Accra on the theme: ‘Mobilizing Business Diagnostics Data to Inform Bottom-up Decisions on Government Policies.’

“Look at the areas in the B/A where we have the produce (cocoa) so things that have to do with the cocoa industry must be in the BA, so we are going to get an industry that has to do with cocoa businesses and discuss those things all together,” Mr Osei-Amoako said to buttress his point.

Data for women businesses

According to him, “we have to look at the women businesses and how we can create data for them” adding that “we will let our research department go into their businesses, identify their needs, bring them to other business organizations to grow their capacity to take advantage of the market.”

He said women constitute more than 51% of the population so “it means that whatever you do to women will stand the test of time and for those in informal sectors, we see a lot of them doing businesses there and as to how to build their capacity and bring them to the level where they can also contribute their quota immensely to the economy is another level that we need to look at.”

Youth

Another area that his leadership will focus on is capacity building for the youth in areas of businesses.

He said his leadership is also focused on preparing the youth who are the future of this country saying “if you are a leader and you are not looking at the youth, then it means that you are not leaving a legacy.

To this end he said, “We are trying to get the youth, prepare them straight away when they are living the universities and let them know what business stands for, prepare their business plan together with them and help them to grow their businesses so that they will also help the economy to grow.”

Concerning what his outfit which is the mother company of industries would be doing to help its members, he said the chamber will “build the capacity of members” and that “there are some basic things that we need to look at as to how to prepare their financial statements, how to do some spending on their revenues so that they don’t usually depend on their spending capital to whatever transactions that they are engaging in.”

Evidence-based advocacy

For his part, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of GNCCI Mr Mark Badu-Aboagye said as a chamber, they believed in evidence-based advocacy and therefore “we want to be able to engage government based on facts and figures and also available information.”

According to him, the workshop was to discuss “an index that we have developed called the Chamber Business Pulse, adding that “we have developed nine based indexes that variation and its indexes will determine whether policies, programmes and projects of government are being relevant to the private sector and to businesses.

The CEO explained that “we have the value index, the growth index, resilience index; we have the dynamic index and the SME policy index.

Concerning the SME index, he said “the importance of the SMEs and their contribution to Ghana’s socio-economic interest” is very vital, and that “we are looking at how government programmes and policies affect SMEs.”

To this end, he said, “we have identified 14 dimensions, 44 sub-dimensions and 140 indicators that would be looked at based on government policies when there are changes, how do these changes affect SMEs and what the government should do.”