President Akufo Addo has tasked all ministers to create ideas to help support the government’s quest to address the economic crises facing the country.

The move is part of aggressive measures by the president to ensure that all his appointees contribute to the revival of the economy. 

Minister of Finance, Ken Ofori Atta, disclosed this in a speech to officially open the Noyaa Akutso Economic Enclave in the Asutuare area in the Greater Accra region.

“We are here today because at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in April 2020, President Akufo-Addo charged us to use the COVID Pandemic to recreate our country.

Following extensive consultations, the GhanaCARES “Obaatan Pa” programme was officially launched on November 20, 2020 to serve as the blueprint to mitigate the impact of the COVID Pandemic and more importantly, catalyze our economic recovery and structural transformation”.

The Finance Minister, therefore, charged all partner ministries and government agencies to expedite action on efforts to improve the growth of the economy which has been challenged since the beginning of the year.

“We have to redouble our efforts, work efficiently and expand our partnerships to drastically reduce our import bill, which exceeds $10 billion annually; to domesticate items that account for about 45% of the value of our annual imports in products such as rice, poultry, pharmaceuticals, jute bags, fish and sugar etc; to reduce the $1 billion we spent to import rice between 2017 and 2021, whiles we expand our rice self-sufficiency ratio which was around 43% as of 2020; to find ingenious ways to quadruple the output of poultry production to meet the national demand of 400,000 metric tonnes and reverse the trend which has seen domestic production of chicken decline from 58% in 2000 to 20% in 2021”.

He also called for a drastic reduction in tomato imports, which 90% come from neighboring country, Burkina Faso. Tomato is estimated to have reached $400million in October, 2022.

The Economic Enclave Project (EEP) is a 10,000 acre site in Asutuare-Kasunya area which complements existing agriculture-based flagships such as the Planting for Food and Jobs and sharpens the focus to promote competitive food import substitution.