President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo on Thursday announced a stimulus package to revamp Ghana’s struggling textile industry.

“Our local textile industry has been struggling for years, and many textile companies have, indeed, gone under. We have decided to give it a major stimulus to help put it on a strong footing,” President Akufo-Addo stated in his 2019 State of the Nation Address (SONA) to Parliament.

“The local textile industry has, therefore, been granted a zero-rated VAT (Value Added Tax) on the supply of locally-made textiles for a period of three years,” he said.

“We have put in place a tax stamp regime for both locally manufactured and imported textiles to address the challenge of pirated designs and logos in the textile trade.”

President Akufo-Addo said the Tema Port had been designated as a Single-Entry Corridor for the importation of textile prints, with a textile taskforce in place to ensure effective compliance, and reduce, if not eliminate, smuggling of imported textiles.

He said a new textile import management system had been instituted, to also control imports of textiles.

He said the “One-District-One-Factory” policy had taken off, and 79 factories under the scheme were at various stages of operation or construction; adding that, another 35 were going through credit appraisal.

“All told, there is a lot of activity going on under the scheme, and it has awoken the interest of young people to go into manufacturing business,” he said.

President Akufo-Addo said under the Rural Enterprises Programme, funded by the African Development Bank and the International Fund for Agricultural Development, 50 small-scale processing factories would be established by the end of the year in 50 districts across the country, particularly in areas where there was evidence of significant post-harvest losses.

He said these would be owned and managed by organised youth groups, with technical support from the Ministry of Trade and Industry.