GIPC Registers 548 Projects Worth $373m

The Ghana Investment Promotions Centre (GIPC) registered 548 projects worth about 373.4 million dollars between January 2000 and June this year. About 85.2 per cent of the investments were made up of Foreign Direct Investments (FDI) and the remaining 14.8 per cent from local investments.

President John Agyekum Kufuor described this as a “positive reaction on the part of foreign investors can be fully exploited only when local counterparts prepare and position themselves appropriately".

He was addressing the opening session of the three-day Volta Regional Investment Conference at Ho, in the Volta Region on Monday.

The Conference, which is on the theme: "Toward the Economic Development of the Volta Region" was organized by Compass Ventures under the auspices of the Ministry of Trade, Industry and the President's Special Investment (PSI) and the Volta Regional Co-ordinating Council.

It is to showcase the enormous economic potentials and attract investors to the region to help speed up the economic development of the region, in particular and Ghana.

President Kufuor commended the Volta Regional Co-ordinating Council for the efforts they were making to lift the region up economically adding, "such initiatives from the regions encourage government to be relentless in its pursuit of both local and foreign investment opportunities for the good of Ghanaians".

He said similar conferences that involved close consultations with both local and foreign development partners, had been held in Accra and other regions to identify and solve institutional, technical, managerial, financial and other problems that tend to impede the nation's drive for investments especially FDI.

President Kufuor pledged government's determination to give equal opportunities to all regions in the provision of appropriate infrastructure and social amenities to make them investment friendly.

The Volta Regional Minister, Kwasi Owusu-Yeboa, said some efforts had been made in the past to identify the economic potentials for the socio-economic development.

However, he said, most of these past efforts did not go beyond the identification of the potentials in the region and the conference was to build upon those earlier efforts in a more coherent, co-ordinated and effective way to take full advantage of the current favourable investment climate in the country to attract investors to the region.