Suame Magazine should be assisted to develop - Deputy Minister

Accra, Feb. 16, GNA -The Kumasi Suame Magazine Metal Works and Vehicle Repair Cluster should be given the necessary assistance to unearth its potential and accelerate the path towards sustainable industrial development, Dr Anthony Akoto Osei, Deputy Minister of Finance and Economic Planning, said on Friday.

He said the Cluster had the potential to develop into a successful case in Africa and even generate foreign exchange through exports if given the needed support.

The Suame Magazine, formed spontaneously in the 1930s, is a cluster of artisans engaged in vehicle repairs and metal works with over 12,000 enterprises and more than 100,000 artisans most of whom are the young. Speaking at a day's dissemination workshop on Cluster-based Industrial Development in Accra, Dr Osei said developing countries like Ghana, which were well endowed with labour and had comparative advantage in labour-intensive industries under competitive conditions, had immense capacity to generate employment opportunities for the poor.

The workshop was organised by the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning for various participants drawn from the European Union, Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), UN Educational, Scientiic and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), UN Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO) and entrepreneurs from the Suame Magazine to disseminate findings of a research carried out between December 2004 and March 2005 on activities of the Kumasi Suame Magazine.

Dr Osei said enterprises in a cluster like that of Suame had the potential to create wealth, generate employment opportunities and reduce poverty.

This is because each enterprise could take advantage of the benefits from agglomeration such as learning from each other, easy access to workers with requisite skills and transacting intermediate goods with others easily.

He described the Suame Cluster as a major source of skill formation and employment, especially for the youth, saying activities being carried out there directly fell in line with the National Youth Employment Programme (NYEP).

He therefore urged the participants and all stakeholders including development partners to take keen interest in the research findings and come out with suggestions that would help improve the status of activities being undertaken by the artisans in the interest of the country.

Dr Alhassan Iddrisu of the Policy Analysis and Research Department of the MOFEP said the findings revealed that artisans with high levels of formal education or training had higher shares of sales to traders and companies, higher machining cost shares and lower share of working time for materials search and procurement and higher value added. He explained that such entrepreneurs were more likely to process their products through machining to obtain high value goods and to market their goods through improved marketing sources such as traders' companies and own retail shops.

Dr Iddrisu dismissed the view that Africans were not motivated to industrialise, saying various profitable attempts had been made but these unfortunately, had not led to remarkably rapid industrial growth as experienced in East Asia.

He recommended that development assistance in the form of transfer of technical and managerial knowledge should be provided to potential innovative entrepreneurs.