Accra, Dec. 20, — Madam Nana Oye Bampoe Addo, Deputy Chief of Staff for Administration, has called for a more deliberate and structured engagement with the African diaspora, describing it as an integral extension of Ghana’s political, economic and intellectual space rather than a symbolic “17th region.”
She said Ghana’s history and development trajectory had never been limited to its geographical boundaries, noting that the ideas, skills, capital and values carried by Ghanaians and people of African descent across the world had shaped the nation in profound ways that could not be fully measured by statistics.
Madam Oye was speaking at the ongoing Diaspora Summit in Accra.
She said the Summit was forcing Ghana and the wider African continent to confront deep-rooted structural distortions in their economies, many of which were inherited from colonial systems built around raw material exports and dependence on imported finished goods.
Madam Oye said more than 70 per cent of Ghana’s consumption was import-dependent, with billions of euros spent annually on food imports such as rice, poultry, sugar and vegetable oil, alongside hundreds of millions of euros on essential medicines. This, she said, continued to drain foreign exchange, suppress domestic production and limit job creation, particularly for the youth.
She noted that this pattern was not accidental but embedded in a resilient colonial economic design that continued to expose Ghana and other African countries to global price shocks and external vulnerabilities.
Madam Oye stressed that dismantling this legacy required a fundamental restructuring of the economy towards value addition, industrial production and export competitiveness, with the diaspora playing a central role in that transformation.
She said while remittances from abroad had helped stabilise household incomes and consumption, consumption without production only deepened dependency and undermined sustainable growth.
Madam Oye said Africa’s shared history of suffering, resilience and human ingenuity demonstrated that African civilisation could neither be erased nor silenced, adding that the global African family, from the continent to the Americas and beyond, had consistently shown the strength to push forward a transformation agenda.
She said the Summit was therefore not only about memory and historical redress, but also about reimagining production systems, investment flows and partnerships capable of delivering jobs and prosperity for young people.
Mr Augustus Goosie Obuadum Tanoh, Presidential Advisor on Ghana’s 24-Hour Economy and Accelerated Export Development, said the Government’s flagship economic reorganisation programme was designed to directly address the structural weaknesses highlighted.
He explained that the 24-Hour Economy Programme sought to reorganise production around integrated value chains in strategic sectors, linking agriculture to processing through agro-industrial partnerships supported by logistics hubs, reliable energy supply and export platforms.
Mr Tanoh said many productive assets in Ghana, including factories, warehouses, ports, hospitals, banks and markets, were operating below capacity due to fragmented and inefficient systems that created bottlenecks between production, processing, logistics and markets.
He said the programme aimed to close those gaps by ensuring that key services such as health, finance and growth industries operated efficiently across time, in recognition of the fact that global markets function continuously and value chains were increasingly time-sensitive.
Mr Tanoh said the diaspora’s exposure to industrialised economies placed it at the centre of Ghana’s transformation agenda, as many diaspora professionals understood how value chains operated, how exports were financed, how standards were enforced and how markets were accessed.
According to him, the key challenge was to channel diaspora skills, capital and networks into investment, processing and export-oriented enterprises rather than limiting engagement to consumption-driven remittance flows.
Mr Tanoh said Africa’s combined GDP of about 3.4 trillion dollars and its vast regional market presented significant opportunities if approached collectively, with the diaspora playing a decisive role as Ghana’s 17th Region.
He noted that agro-processing facilities currently operated at only 30 to 40 per cent of capacity, while innovation hubs and production markets linked to large consumer bases could unlock substantial value if properly financed and integrated.
Mr Tanoh said Government had already taken steps to lower barriers to diaspora engagement, including the introduction of a Visa-on-Arrival policy for Africans and people of African descent, strengthened investment facilitation through the Ghana Investment Promotion Centre, improved access to land, regulatory reforms and the development of industrial infrastructure.
These measures, he said, were aimed at building a predictable and competitive enterprise ecosystem capable of attracting long-term investment.
GHBUSS
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