The Director General of the World Trade Organisation, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, has heaped praises on Ghana’s digitalization initiative.
Ghana is among the digital leaders in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Digital Economy diagnostic conducted in 2020 identified key bottlenecks that needs to be removed to further accelerate Ghana’s digital transformation.
Digitalization agenda tackles the problem in two folds – collecting the data of all Ghanaians is how you widen the tax net and increase domestic tax revenue to record levels.
Digitalization in Ghana also ensures revenue is not wasted, and that is solved by digitalizing operations of all government agencies, putting the work in the hands of computers rather than leaving the majority of it to the fallible human.
The WTO Boss described Ghana’s digital push as the “wave of the future” when she was received by the President Nana Akufo Addo at the Jubilee House on Tuesday on her working visit to Ghana as part of her maiden tour of Africa, which will also find her visiting Senegal, Cote d’ Ivoire, Kenya, Tanzania and Rwanda.
As a result of this encouraging trend, she continued, “we are thinking that this is an area where our countries can benefit, and when we look, Ghana, as we mentioned to the Hon Minister in the morning, seems to be doing well providing some digitally traded services and professional services in business outsourcing.”
“There are many people trading digitally, in Ghana, we met many women today who are online and are doing digital trade, so one of the areas where we are thinking of working with our countries is on this issue of digital trade. We met to look at what are the challenges and constraints and opportunities because on the supply side, we have the International Trade Centre that can work and is working directly with some women here. “
Speaking on WTOs contribution to this, she stated that, the organisation can help with issues on certification, quality control of products, breaking into new markets, etc.
Therefore, she continued, “I just wanted to point this out to you that investing in the digital economy is very good because that’s going to be the wave of the future.”
She was quick to add that, WTO is already negotiating an E-commerce agreement that will decide the rules of digital trade and asked Ghana to participate fully towards its formulation.
On related matters of key concern to the Organisation, Dr Ikonjo-Iweala, appealed to Ghana to expedite action towards the ratification of Fisheries Subsidies Agreement which has found consensus after 21 years.
By this agreement, she stressed, “we were able to do away with 22 million dollars in harmful subsidies that lead to illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing and are actually negotiating a second phase of this agreement to deal with over-fishing and over-capacity.”
She emphasised on the importance of the agreement because 12 million people in Africa, depend on fisheries and Africa is losing 2.3 billion dollars from illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing and 3 billion from over-fishing and over-capacity.”
