Ghana Beyond Aid Is Not Anti-Aid - Senior Minister

By David Kodjo

The Senior Minister, Mr Yaw Osafo Maafo, has told the country's development partners that, the Ghana Beyond Aid policy is not an anti- aid group formed by government to cut off support from its partners.

He explained that the Ghana Beyond Aid initiative is to ensure that the support required and provided by its development partners was directed to suit the priorities of the country.

Mr OsafoMaafo said this in his opening remarks on Tuesday, when he met the Heads of Mission and development partners to discuss the vision of the Ghana Beyond Aid agenda, in Accra.

He said, "We must be in the driving seat to decide the particular area and the kind of aid we may require from our partners and how we want to use the it."

The Senior Minister stated that, though Ghana may require aid to facilitate development, the powers to determine the priorities of the support provided, must be in the hands of the country so that such support would not turn out to be a misplaced priority to the country.

"The mandate of deciding which sector of growth should be supported by partners must be in the powers of Ghanaians," he reiterated.

Mr Osafo-Marfo said, the Ghana Beyond Aid policy was to help to do a postmortem of what Ghana had done in the past, the success it has achieved in the past years and also to pass judgement and ascertain why the country was still struggling to develop.

He noted with concern and question why despite all the excellent resources such as rich land, minerals, exuberant youthful resources endowed upon the country by God, the developmental paradigm in Ghana was still nothing to write home about.

"Some of us believe that if things had been done correctly in the past, Ghana would have been in the position to offer support to other African countries who are less endowed with the natural resources our country has been blessed with," he said.

Mr Maafo said, it had become necessary for the nation to rewrite the development history which must begin by changing the mindset of every Ghanaian citizen.

For this reason, he explained that the meeting was to seek their inputs on the initiative as part of the process to the implementation of the Ghana Beyond Aid agenda.

For his part, Chairman of the Development Partners and Head of Missions, Mr Christoph Retzlaff, lauded the vision by the Ghana government, and said that, the Ghana Beyond Aid strategy was ambitious and could be achieved by 2028 through co-operating be all.

He said there is the need for civil society organisations and all development partners to make sure that the Ghana Beyond Aid strategy was endorsed by all.

He said that Germany had already started the shift in the focus from traditional development co-operation to sustainable development economy to invest in Ghana and help in job creation.

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