The GEPA collaborated with the Ghana Institute of Freight Forwarders (GIFF) and Export Business Community to spearhead the session to ensure participants receive requisite knowledge and skills for adequate data protection of non-traditional products.

Similar programmes will be taking place in other border regions of Ghana for stakeholders on the imperatives of protecting and ensuring transmission of accurate information during export declaration.  

Non-traditional products such as Cocoa, Shea nuts, Coffee, Cashew Nuts, Handicrafts, Bananas, Plantain and many more are exported to various market destinations across the globe, but data provided by local exporters had been found to be mostly inaccurate.

The GEPA told participants during the training that it had the mandate to ensure non-traditional products exported to various foreign markets possessed the right data and were safe for exchange.

Mr Maxwell Osei-Kusi, the Director of GEPA, said the sensitisation programme became necessary because of emerging observations about inaccurate export declaration forms and loss of data due to non-presentation on some manually completed export forms.

“We have noticed that some of the data that we receive which has been published to many stakeholders - World Bank, United Nations and other partners - for decision making and analysis, and it is crucial for an accurate and reliable export data to be provided,” Mr Osei-Kusi said.

He stated that GIFF should see themselves as the heart of the country because any information given was being used to make a vital decisions for national policy and development.

Ghana has set a target of achieving $5.3 billion from exportation of non-traditional goods by the end of 2021.

Mr Henry Ayinemi Atampubiri, the Upper West Regional Commander of Customs, Excise and Preventive Service Division of the Ghana Revenue Service Commander said Freight Forwarders played important roles in the exportation process.

He said it was the duty of Customs to educate GIFF to capture credible information of exporters which would reflect at the national level.

“Most of our Freight Forwarders are not well informed in the customs procedures and there is the need of updating their skills through organised capacity building for them”, he said.

The objective of the programme was to create awareness among GEPA stakeholders regarding to need to ensure accurate data entry during export declaration to avert export data loss.