Former Chairman of the Ghana Investment Promotion Centre (GIPC), Kwesi Abeasi, is asking Ghanaian businesses to get onto the international supply and value chains and work towards staying on them to stay relevant on the international market.
According to him, businesses have the obligation of coming up with products and services that are competitive enough to stand out on the international market.
Mr. Abeasi was speaking at a CEOs forum organised by the African Chamber of Trade.
“Staying on the international supply value chain is imperative of businesses for them to be able to compete effectively on the international market, especially after the devastating effect of the pandemic. Everyone is trying to recover, and if you can recover quickly, you need to study the value and supply chains of these products.”
“The private sector should therefore quickly organize to investigate and get onto the various international supply and value chains which are of interest to them and take advantage of the opportunities.”
Businesses have been looking at ways to best protect their supply and value chains from future disruption following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, which came along with challenges like manufacturing shutdowns, a deficit of skilled labour, shortage of key logistics components, and spikes in production and transportation costs.
The World Trade Organisation recently noted that these challenges would last longer than originally thought, possibly into next year, and that developing economies would be persistently marginalized by weak links in global supply chains.
In this regard, Ghanaian businesses are being urged to come up with measures to heal and strengthen these ailing chains to stay relevant on the international market.
President of the Laweh Open University, Professor Goski Alabi, also urged businesses to learn how to adapt to changes in the business environment to stay afloat.
She noted, “Businesses have moved onto the digital space and many of us are still focusing on how to do business in the physical space. Coping with changes requires retooling, retraining ourselves and changing ourselves to move along with the change. And we can only change ourselves if we learn. If our digital fluency and digital citizenship are weak, it will be difficult for us to cope with the change that is required.”
The Ghana chapter of the African Chamber for Trade, which was inaugurated on Thursday, is aimed at networking and helping local businesses build capacities to take advantage of cross-border trade and trade among themselves.