The Ghana Investment Promotion Centre (GIPC) says it has begun the profiling of existing investment opportunities across all districts in the country to serve as a guide to potential investors and also part of efforts to ensure an even distribution of projects and foreign investments.

The move by the state investment promoter, according to its Director of Investor Services Division, Edward Ashong-Lartey, would tackle the seeming over-concentration of projects in certain parts of the country to the detriment of other regions.

“Some regions attract more investors than others and this is based on a number of factors; so, what we are doing as a centre is to compile the list of investment opportunities in the various regions.

Working with the district assemblies, we want to showcase the business opportunities that exist in other parts of the country to open them up to investments,” he said at a media training on GIPC’s activities and projects in Accra.

“Once we begin to market the opportunities and companies start coming in, we are sure to get the numbers [of foreign projects] going up in other parts as well,” he added.

The centre seeks to leverage that same strategy to drive investment to other critical sectors that have the potential to push the growth of the nation.
“Some sectors are more attractive to investors than others basically due to the initial capital outlay or what they may have to go through to establish a business in that sector,” Mr. Ashong-Lartey indicated.

In line with this strategy, Head of Research at the GIPC, Eugenia Okyere, said the centre will this year embark on an investor sensitization tour to regions that have recorded low investments over time.

The rationale, she said, will be to collate projects in strategic sectors that could be of interest to investors — citing tourism which holds huge prospects to the development of the Northern parts of the country.

“Through the regional sensitization, we will identify specific investment projects and opportunities to both first-time investors and existing businesses that may want to diversify the operations in new areas of the economy,” she noted.