Chief Executive Officer of Ghana Investment Promotion Center (GIPC), Yofi Grant, has expressed his optimism over Ghana becoming attractive to more foreign direct investments in spite of the crippling effect of the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to him, as companies are walking the path of recovery from the pandemic, it will be imperative for them to have needed resources in the process as Africa has an attractive market.
“The truth of the matter is that, lives and livelihoods have to be sustained… and it’s better that people will position themselves to take advantage of the opportunities that are created by the pandemic and quite a number of these opportunities have been created. But bear in mind on the onset of the pandemic, many countries virtually started looking inwards.
“Monies that could have been for investments were used to sustain lives and livelihoods; we did our fair bit, we even got monies to support us. But if you look at the big economies, almost all of them had to borrow trillions of dollars to get their economies going and that has dried up a fair bit of the foreign direct investments.
“The truth of the matter is, the opportunities remain and many economies are now having to retool and reboot and they do require the resources, repositioning and looking at markets which are attractive and the African market, especially the AfCFTA, has become much more attractive in Ghana because the Ghana Beyond Aid mantra and strategy has also become attractive as a destination preferred direct investment. Because we are looking for partnership and linkages and I believe that going forward, the world will focus on partnerships and linkages and just not look inward because this is a pandemic that you cannot solve in just one country”.
Yofi Grant
For this to be achieved, Mr. Yofi Grant disclosed that it will demand the involvement and participation of relevant stakeholders to collectively provide solution to pervading problems.
“It requires a very concerted effort to solve it and so, you realize that despite the fact that some countries have gone ahead to provide vaccines etc., it becomes clear that these vaccines should be available globally because you can’t solve the problem with one side of the world leaving the other side.
“A lot of companies will have to be reignited and the African opportunities cannot be discounted. In fact , t’s the only real opportunity remaining because a lot of Europe and America have been maxed out in terms of returns [but] Africa still offers attractive returns… and lots to offer in terms of value addition, raw materials and resources that requires a number of investments.
In December 2020, Yofi Grant indicated that, Ghana has attracted more than $1 billion in Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) by the end of Q3 2020.
According to him, Ghana recorded FDI to the tune of $180 million in Q1 2020. He indicated that the GIPC expected to have recorded zero FDI in Q2 because of the destructions in global supply chains and global financial systems but that was not the case.
He explained that investors understand the plans of the government and also understand the future direction of the country, so they put their money where the mass is and are still investing in Ghana.
