The Information Minister, Kojo Oppong Nkrumah, has urged heads of agencies affiliated to the Ghana Investment Promotion Center (GIPC) to strive to create the necessary atmosphere to attract Ghanaians living abroad and the African diaspora to invest their resources in the country.

“My biggest word will go to what I call the facilitators. The facilitators are those who work in the various organizations or agencies that are supposed to actually make it possible for people to be on-boarded in this investment process and they span a wide scope.

“They are people from regulatory agencies, utility organizations and people who are supposed to give permits. Many things in the value chain that will finally make it possible for that potential investment that we are expecting to connect with opportunities back home.

“Half the time the facilitators are those who frustrate the process. It doesn’t matter how well the President will do to try and stabilize the economy or how far he will travel to sell Ghana or what the GIPC will do to put things like this together, it doesn’t matter how much capital people have out there.

“If we the facilitators who are responsible for unlocking the kind of investment so that they can connect with the potential, if we frustrate the process, the value will be zero,” he added.

He made this call at the maiden edition of the Ghana Diaspora Investment Summit in Accra on Thursday June 24.

Speaking on the theme “The New Normal, leveraging Diaspora investments to build back better”, the Minister said there are many Ghanaians living abroad and Africans in the diaspora who have the intention to reinvest their resources in the Ghanaian economy but there were many bottlenecks that frustrated and caused them to lose interest in coming home.

The Ghana Diaspora Investment Summit is a two-day programme held under the auspices of the President Nana Addo Danquah Akufo-Addo and supported by the Foreign Affairs Ministry, Information Ministry, the Diaspora Affairs Office at the Office of the President, Diaspora Africa Forum, and Beyond the Return Secretariat under the Ghana Tourism Authority.

The Minister in his admonishing stressed on the need to effectively mobilize and engage the diaspora as active partners in the nation’s development.

He called on the GIPC to engender a more constructive interaction with Africans in the diaspora and all people of African descent in areas such as trade and investment, as well as skills and knowledge development to the betterment of Ghana.