The Asantehene, Otumfuo Osei Tutu II, has called on the board of directors of Development Bank Ghana (DBG) to work on projects aimed at accelerating development and growth in the country.
According to Otumfuo Osei Tutu II, working on serious developmental policies should be the priority of the DBG Board. He made the call when a delegation of the board of directors for the bank paid a courtesy call on him at the Manhyia palace.
“If you have to do infrastructure, go out there, get the money, do the roads, and put a toll on it. For instance, we want to do an inland port but there is no railway connection.
“How do you do it? That’s infrastructure and that is development. Why can’t you get GPHA to commit to how many tonnes of loads they get and use that to guarantee them a loan so that they can use the loan to build a railway? So, if they record 300 tonnes each day that the railway is going to cart, that is enough funding. So you space it out with the cost of the railway line. These are things we should prioritise.”
Otumfuo Osei Tutu II
Otumfuo, meanwhile, advised the bank not to lose sight of their mandate and capitalise on making Ghana self-sufficient and export-oriented to help salvage the country’s economic crisis.
“If you fail at this, it will mean Ghana has failed because I don’t think you should sit and watch it turn into a commercial bank. You must be able to go out to source funding, do your feasibility and programme it in such a way that you can defend it and then bring the funding home so that you manage it.
“You must understand how you will be contributing to economic development. This will help us deal with our fiscal upheavals. I hope you as a development bank capitalise on making the country self-sufficient and export-based.”
Otumfuo Osei Tutu II
DBG Will Live Up to Expectation
Mr Yaw Ansu, the board chairman of DBG, on his part, assured the King that the bank will live up to expectation.
“DBG is designed to be a key instrument in supporting Ghana’s economic transformation to an industrialised and prosperous Ghana beyond aid. This is a goal that I know His Majesty Otumfuo is very passionate about.”
Mr Yaw Ansu
Mr Ansu explained that DBG’s mandate is to provide medium and long-term finance to Ghanaian businesses, specifically manufacturing, agribusiness and high-value services particularly, in the tech sector and tourism.
“DBG is a wholesale bank. This means that we don’t lend direct loans to businesses. So, if you are a business you cannot come to DBG and ask for funds. What we do is that we source long-term capitals at a very reasonable rate and we provide it to the banks.
“We send the guidelines, and the banks choose their customers, but then we give them the mandate in terms of manufacturing or agribusiness and sectors that we think can help transform Ghana’s economy. What we hope to do is to bring this long-term finance so DBG can lend up to about 10-15 years at reasonable rate compared to what one can get in the market. So, this is our contribution to try to ginger up these sectors with the vision of an industrialised Ghana.”
Mr Yaw Ansu
After having been first conceived in 2017, the Development Bank Ghana (DBG) was launched in June last year 2021 to help catalyse growth in the country’s small and medium enterprise sector. The bank has an initial $700 million to loan to private financial institutions including CalBank, CBG, GCB and Fidelity Bank– who in turn will on-lend to SMEs.
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