Deputy-General of the National Development Planning Commission (NDPC), Dr Kojo Essiem Mensah-Abrampa, has disclosed that the national policy framework on precision quality by the Commission has been institutionalized.

According to him, the Commission has sailed through dealing with and educating individuals on the policy and finally proceeded to institutions. He revealed that currently, the onus now rests with these institutions that the Commission is working together with to make it succeed.

Dr Mensah-Abrampa indicated that the policy can still be sustained even with change in government because the policy will thrive in these institutions. He highlighted that the NDPC is working with institutions which include CTVET, Ghana Standards Authority, Ministry of employment and labor relations, the ministry of trade and industry, the national development planning commission and ministry of education.

“The good thing is that we have gone beyond the individual conviction [and] we have gone to the institutional conviction. So now, it has been institutionalized… So, it’s a real multiple roles and multi-faceted discipline and therefore putting this team together has been a challenge. Now, we’re there [and] we’ve been able to develop a draft of roles and responsibilities for each institution to be part of this whole complementary action, to drive this precision quality.”
Dr Kojo Essiem Mensah-Abrampa

Commenting on whether Ghana is prepared enough to take advantage of the Africa Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) using the precision quality concept, Dr Mensah-Abrampa stated that the precision quality is basically producing things that are based on the needs of the industrial sector. This, he explained, can be linked to standards, trade and markets.

To this end, he indicated that one of the challenges the country faced in its first industrialization effort had to do with the market because it was constrained in terms of consumption. However, Ghana has been exposed to some one billion people, instead of the 30 million indigenes in the country.

Dr Mensah-Abrampa explained that this means the market has been created by Africa Continental Free Trade Area. Nonetheless, he noted that the challenge is that everybody is sizing up into identifying the areas where they have the competitive and comparative advantage and specialize so that they can take advantage of that market.

“People are going to develop more complex taste because it is no more just the Ghanaian market. So, competition is there, comparative advantage must be taken care of but your ability to enter these market depends on the quality of your product. I do not think we are there yet and I know that the AfCFTA Secretariat, ministry of trade and ministry of agriculture are pulling it together and I think that is one of the essence of this policy because it is key.”
Dr Kojo Essiem Mensah-Abrampa

National policy framework on precision quality

Elaborating on the challenges in the implementation of the national policy framework on precision quality, the NDPC deputy general admitted the struggles the Commission encountered in getting the policy off the ground.

“In Ghana, the softer things are the most difficult because there you need to deal with people. Coordination in Ghana, you’re not just talking to institutions, you’re talking to people who must ascribe, and you need to influence and convince them and we have a situation where just a change of a person from a position to another could affect the whole discussions. So, we’ve gone through the whole iterations, but we are fortunate that this time we’ve gone very far.”
Dr Kojo Essiem Mensah-Abrampa

Dr Mensah-Abrampa highlighted that the national development planning commission at the initial stage put up a theory that if the country wants to develop, there is the need to look at how its private sector, that is the raw materials that it possesses can be linked to its industrial process. He opined that there is the need to do more for trade to thrive in the country because the private sector and service sector are growing because of trade but the investor sector is not responding to these growth triggers.

“What we do now is to produce them in the raw form and export them out, then when we export them, the things that we need, we buy them.”
Dr Kojo Essiem Mensah-Abrampa