Minister for Foreign Affairs and Regional Integration, Shirley Ayorkor Botchway has made a call to the Ghanaian missions abroad to reach out to Ghanaians living abroad in order to facilitate their participation in national affairs.

She said, “it is the duty of ambassadors, high commissioners, consul generals and honorary consuls to make our missions customer friendly as far as practicable so that they will not be inhibited from dealing with them”.

The minister who was speaking at the Diaspora Homecoming Summit at the Accra International Conference Centre also called on the leaders of associations of Ghanaians leaving abroad to strengthen ties with the missions so that they can work together for the good of all.

She said, “I am calling for better communication and more engagements between the missions and Ghanaian communities. This will help the ministry to become more effective in supervising the role our missions play in promoting and protecting our nationals”.

Mrs Botcwhay added that “educating our nationals continuously on their rights and responsibilities in their host countries is of utmost importance. Even more crucial is the need to sensitise them about the economic opportunities back home to enable them to improve their income”.

She said the institutional mechanism for achieving these objectives are already in place and will further be strengthened adding that she is focused on making economic diplomacy central to Ghana’s foreign policy pursuit.

She emphasized that the wellbeing of Ghanaians abroad is no longer a simple humanitarian issue because remittances from them are “increasingly becoming a significant factor in the nation’s economic development”.