Senior Minister, Yaw Osafo Maafo Heads ‘Ghana Beyond Aid Committee’

The Senior Minister, Yaw Osafo Maafo, will be chairing a committee set up to oversee actualization of the Akufo-Addo Administration’s vision of a Ghana beyond aid

President Nana Akufo-Addo announced the setting-up this committee at the May Day celebration at the Baba Yara Sports Stadium in Kumasi on Tuesday.

The Committee will be tasked with drawing up a charter which outlines the steps the country is to take in making Ghana self-reliant.

The Committee will have 10 members comprising three members each from the Government (Ministries of Finance, Planning and Employment and Labour Relations), Organised Labour, and the Private Enterprise Federation.

The Committee has also been given six months to be ready with the Charter on Ghana Beyond Aid.

“The Charter will then be subjected to scrutiny and debate by Parliament, and adopted as a follow up to the Coordinated Programme of Economic and Social Development Policies. The nation will then know in detail how we intend to move Ghana to a situation Beyond Aid,” President Akufo-Addo stated.

Whilst welcoming the partnership of organized labour with Government and the private sector to work together to develop home-grown solutions to Ghana's problems, President Akufo-Addo also noted that this joint effort would present the country with the most effective path to realizing the vision of a Ghana Beyond Aid.

The first step
President Akufo-Addo stressed that Ghana cannot continue to be dependent on the production and export of raw materials for development.

President Akufo-Addo speaking at the May Day celebration

“We must turn our back on the old economy, and build a value-added, industrialised economy with modernised agriculture, which is neither victim nor pawn of the world economic order. Our relations with the world must be characterized by an increase in trade and investment co-operation, not aid,” he said.

The President said that was the way to develop “healthy relations with other countries, and put Ghanaian products at the high end of the value chain in the global marketplace, and create jobs for the teeming masses of Ghanaians, particularly the youth. The vision is to build a free, prosperous, independent country, a Ghana Beyond Aid.”