The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the GIPC, Mr Yoofi Grant, who announced this in Accra last Monday, said the initiative would help create job opportunities and deal with some of the economic challenges confronting the country.

He was speaking at a reception held for contestants of the 2017 Innovation Prize for Africa (IPA) in Accra.

Mr Grant said the GIPC would also expose innovators in the country to international investors, so that they could collaborate to initiate business ventures.

Although Ghana is hosting the sixth edition of the IPA, it has no innovator among the shortlisted nominees for the award.

Reception

The reception, which was hosted by the African Innovation Foundation (AIF) for the finalists of the competition, was to showcase to the contestants Ghanaian artifacts and innovations to engender investment opportunities.

“We are going to create a portal that will highlight opportunities in Ghana, not just innovative ones but all the opportunities from region to region,” Mr Grant said, adding: “This is because very often many, investors do not see the opportunities to invest in when they want to do so.”

Awards

Mr Grant said although no Ghanaian qualified for an award this year, the GIPC would encourage Ghanaians to participate in the competition next year.

“We do not have any Ghanaian in the finals this year, but we are hoping that next year we can push some of them to compete. It is a very prestigious award and it also highlights you in the international world,” he said.

He encouraged finalists who could not win the first prize to keep pushing their innovations to enable them to commercialise them. “They should keep on going; the fact that you have engineered some software that did not win the first place in an innovation award does not mean it is the end of it.

You can actually commercialise it and put it to good use,” he said. Mr Grant said a lot of innovations had been commercialized without being made public.

“This is an event that rewards creativity and problem solving through innovations, very much what Africa requires. Most of these innovations are engineered forAfrican problems,” he added.