“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.