The Presidential Advisor on the 24-Hour Economy and Accelerated Export Development Programme, Goosie Tanoh, has called on Ghanaian CEOs to engage the secretariat early and invest in the 24-Hour Economy national transformation drive rather than wait to see how it unfolds.
Speaking at the 10th Ghana CEO Summit and Expo in Accra, the Presidential Advisor informed the CEOs about the ongoing opportunities that they can invest in and made it clear that the best opportunities would go to those who move first.
“Engage with us early. The best opportunities, the anchor positions in our parks and our funds, go to those who move first. Invest in this transformation as partners, with your own capital and your own conviction. Do not just sit and wait to see if it works,” he said.
Mr. Tanoh disclosed that the 24-Hour Economy Programme currently has a pipeline of 18 bankable projects open for private sector participation and leadership. He explained that the programme would be implemented through private financing and entrepreneurship, with the government providing policy support, coordination, incentives, and regulation.
He further encouraged Ghanaian entrepreneurs to take advantage of opportunities under the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) and other international markets, describing the 24-Hour Economy Programme as Ghana’s next growth frontier.
According to him, the programme is designed to increase production, expand exports, create jobs, and retain more value within the Ghanaian economy through stronger collaboration between the government and the private sector.
Read the full speech below:
It is an honour to address you at the 10th Ghana CEO Summit structured, as it is, around “Accelerating Ghana’s Economic Transformation”.
At this year’s launch, the summit’s founder said something worth repeating here: “After ten years of dialogue, Ghana must now enter a decade of execution”. President Mahama agrees. And the 24-Hour Economy and Accelerated Export Development (24H+) Programme is the instrument the President has offered to enable us all to collectively deliver this execution.
Ladies and Gentlemen, 24H+ is the product of a national vision that emerged from dialogues such as this, which reflected on both the potential of our national economy and its structural challenges and how to overcome these. These discussions highlighted the need for a strong developmental partnership to unlock our productivity. On the one hand, we need central coordination by a national political leadership that can design, incentivise, and guard our path to development. On the other hand, we need the creative entrepreneurship of self-organised groups of patriotic citizens in companies (the people represented here), in cooperatives, in associations, in trade unions that actually directly produce wealth or facilitate its production.
This vision led to a strategic and holistic national economic transformation programme with three pillars.
First, we increase productivity and output – link by link across our most critical value chains. Second, we improve the circulation of what we produce through better marketing and infrastructure. Third, we raise both individual and collective skill sets and mindsets – making us all better workers and citizens. And we do it all over again – integrating and strengthening our productive economy with every cycle and creating meaningful employment, wealth, and security for our people.
This Programme has eight integrated sub -programmes that work with Ghanaian entrepreneurs:
- Grow24 — establishing agroecological and agro-processing parks in defined industry corridors where “agripreneurs ” can rebuild the value chains for strategic products – from genetic material to table or export point and everything between, to reduce export dependency, build resilience, build scale, and foster innovation.
- Make24 — establishing industrial parks where investors can build modern manufacturing in food processing, machinery and tools production, pharmaceuticals, textiles and garments, and chemical industries
- Show24 — establishing the organisation, infrastructure, and funding that our talented creatives need to both deepen our African personality and compete on the world stage with truly unique products.
- Build24 — interventions to plan settlements around our new production centres better, produce affordable, climate – friendly, and aesthetically pleasing community -oriented housing using cheaper local materials and appropriate technologies.
- Connect24 — providing the infrastructure necessary to support production, e.g. 2GB of new climate -friendly power generation and distribution systems; or transforming the Volta Lake and its tributaries as a new North -South “highway” for moving people and products at a fraction of what it costs to do so by road; or developing the Tamale International Airport’s perishables export capacity.
- Fund24 — affordable long-term private infrastructure and enterprise financing, through private capital mobilization at home and abroad to support all these projects and through policy changes that make it easier for our finance industry to put money into production rather than just import facilitation.
- Aspire24 — upskilling our workforce from top to bottom and imbuing it with a constructive and creative culture that takes pride in achievement.
- Go24 — mobilising community and whole -of-government engagement that locks in the gains and values of the programme for the long term.
Ladies and Gentlemen, where did all of this come from? This was not conjured in some ministerial backroom by bureaucrats or politicians. This was developed through engagements with various associations that represent entrepreneurs, developers, investors, farmers, engineers, project managers, creatives, bankers, exporters, etc.
This is your consolidated thinking placed in historical analytical context and returned to you as a programme. This is yours.
Ladies and Gentlemen , how do we intend to implement all this? We do so by breaking the programme down into discrete bankable projects that entrepreneurs, investors, financiers, service providers, and communities can mobilise behind.
We currently have a pipeline of 18 projects available for your participation and leadership.
I say again, 24H+ will be implemented by the private sector through private financing, not by central government agencies drawing down on the consolidated fund or deploying sovereign debt.
Government will make policy, facilitate, coordinate, incentivise, strictly regulate, backstop (where necessary) and tax appropriately but not deliver. The acumen, the skills, the investment judgement, the management, the risks, and the profits are yours. It is your businesses that will have to penetrate and create new regional and other markets. And the market opportunities have never been so good! We have a 400 million-strong West African market that we are central to and that we understand deeply. We have AfCFTA opening up the full market of 1.4 billion African citizens – duty-free. And now, just this month China has opened up its 1.4 billion market with a middle class of 400-500 million people to all of Africa.
If Ghanaian exporters are strategic and consistent, there is more than enough room to thrive and increase. Again, 24H+ works to clear the way of the obstacles that have frustrated exporters in the past – the issues with Customs, the issues with the air and seaports and border posts. We are tackling the incentives that you need to level the playing field and compete in these export markets. And we will support efforts to open doors and markets for your products. But the drive must come from you. The will to learn and meet the quality standards, scheduling consistency, and other requirements of, e.g., the Chinese market, must come from you – the private sector. You must be willing to invest in the quality and consistency of the value chains that enable exports.
So here is my challenge to the Chief Executives in this room.
Do not treat the 24-Hour Economy as something the government is doing to you, or for you. Treat it as something we are doing together because it cannot succeed any other way.
24H+ and our partners can secure land, install power, deliver water, lobby for the legal reform, and mobilise capital and develop incentives and exemptions. But 24H+ will not run factories. We cannot win export contracts.
We cannot build brands or hire the second and third shifts. That is your job.
So I ask three things of you. First, engage with us early. The best opportunities, the anchor positions in our parks and our funds, go to those who move first. Second, let’s think bigger. We are not just producing for Accra or Kumasi, but for Lagos, for Abidjan, for Nairobi, and Johannesburg and for Beijing!
And third, invest in this transformation as partners, with your own capital and your own conviction. Do not just sit and wait to see if it works.
The countries that will prosper in this century are not those that consume the future. They are the countries that produce it.
What we need is alignment and execution. Alignment between policy and production. Between finance and industry. Between infrastructure and exports.
Between government and enterprise. Ladies and gentlemen, Ghana has spent too long exporting our raw materials and the jobs that should have been ours, while we import the finished goods. The 24-Hour Programme is our deliberate decision to reverse that. To make more, to export more, and to keep more of the value here at home.
This is the next growth frontier for the Ghanaian economy. The framework is before you. What we need is the Ghanaian Entrepreneur to drive this.
The decade of execution has begun. Let us move, together, from vision to action.
Thank you very much.
God bless you all.
And God bless our homeland Ghana.
– End of Speech –
