Mr Mahmud Khalid, Upper West Regional Minister has said the recent trends in international economics, especially the prevailing credit crunch, should reawaken the Ghana Investment Promotion Centre (GIPC) on the need to refocus on promoting investment from internal sources.
He observed that activities of the GIPC in the past had been focused more on investment from outside the country and that did not help the growth of the national economic and the wellbeing of people.
Time has now come for the GIPC to take up the challenge and reach out more to expose its activities and educate the people on what it can do to help the growth of investment in the country, Mr. Khalid said.
Mr. Khalid made these remarks at a seminar on the promotion of investment in the Upper West Region in Wa on Tuesday.
He called for the opening of GIPC offices in all the regions to bring its activities closer to the people and it should assist local entrepreneurs with funding and resources to enhance their businesses.
"There is no doubt that potential for investment exists in our region. The critical issue is how to expose these potentials and also mobilise the needed investment to reap the full benefits of those potentials,' Mr. Khalid lamented.
Mr. Khalid announced that his administration was in the process of mobilizing expertise and professionals to form a "Think Tank" to consider the best and fastest ways of mobilizing resources and attract the needed investment towards the overall development of the Region.
Mr. Khalid challenged Municipal and District Assemblies in the Region to generate ideas at their level on how to fast track the development needs of the communities.
Mr. Khalid said the greatest challenge facing the people has been poverty and underdevelopment and tasked the districts assemblies to mobilise resources and come out with plans and programmes to address poverty and underdevelopment that had plagued the people for long.
He identified low capacity and inability of small scale business entrepreneurs to form partnerships and to raise the needed financial resources as a major hindrance to business men and women to undertake meaningful investment initiatives in the region.
Mr. Khalid said government was committed to eradicating poverty among Ghanaians through meaningful investment in the agricultural and other beneficial sectors as well as the judicious utilisation of national resources to the best interest of the people.
He appealed to people in the region to sustain the prevailing peace to attract investors to help develop the communities.
Mr. Khalid however bemoaned the numerous chieftaincy disputes in the Region and challenged the Regional House of Chiefs to find alternative resolution mechanisms to resolve all disputes out of court.
"Let us use traditional ways of settling these disputes rather than going to the law court to find adjudication which had never helped sustained peace in the communities." he said.