The Ghanaian government plans to double exports by the end of 2019

In an interview with JoyNews, Carlos Ahenkorah said “the intention of my Ministry and by extension, the government is to double exports by the end of 2019.”

He outlined the government’s strategy to increase exports as a measure of stabilizing the Ghana cedi in the longer term.

“We at the Ministry of Trade have mentioned that the major solution to this problem is to increase or improve exports and what we are doing in this department is to get the Ghana Export Promotion Authority to lead the discussion on the national expo strategy, which they have done. Now it is left with the implementation where we are going to roll out very soon for people to see what we plan to do.”

“By so saying, what we are doing as a strategy is to identify the top 20 exports of the country, see what the challenges are and see what we can do to improve the lots of these companies and push them as far as we can for them to improve on their production that they are doing… so the more exports that we are able to do the more we put our cedi in better shape,” he added.

He argued that the recent depreciation of the cedi “is not very normal and that we haven’t seen anything like that in the economy as far as I am concerned.”

“Even if it happened it, it happened a very long period of time so it should tell us that something should have kicked-start this free fall and I can conveniently say that there is a very good reason that this happened…it was something that beyond our control. It was something that was orchestrated by previous events which if he [Vice President] comes out to explain we would all understand why it happened like that.”