James Asare Adjei, AGI President
The Association of Ghana Industries (AGI) Council has appealed to government to expedite action on the operationalisation of the Ghana Export & Import (EXIM) Bank to help meet the medium to long-term financing needs of businesses operating in the sector.
The AGI made the request in its latest Business Barometer (BB) report released in Accra recently.
High electricity tariffs
Indicating that business confidence in the country has begun to rise from 99.0 points in the third quarter of 2016 to 101.6 points in the last quarter, the AGI said high electricity tariff was the major challenge for all businesses in the country in the fourth quarter.
It said: “Businesses are still under pressure from multiplicity of taxes for the second quarter running. About 10 percent more of employers in the previous quarter are likely to hire more within the next six months.”
James Asare Adjei, President of AGI, therefore urged government to reduce or scrap some taxes that were inimical to the growth of businesses.
EXIM background
The Ghana EXIM Bank, launched in November last year, is expected to provide soft loans to commercial banks for onward lending to SMEs.
A nine-member board was put in place last year to manage it, with Dr. Barfuor Osei as its CEO.
Plans for execution
Dr Osei discussed how his outfit intends to help deal with the problems of the SME sector once it receives funds to start operations.
“One of the major problems of the SME is long term fund financing, if you go to the commercial banks, they will give you a short term but most of these businesses need financing on a longer term, so all the financing that the EXIM Bank will be giving out will be going to be long term, and we are not going to compete with the commercial banks, we are going to fill those gaps that the commercial banks have left hanging,” he said.
“Businesses need support in so many different ways that the commercial banks don’t offer, so the EXIM will be providing all these support. You see people go to the commercial banks and say the interest rates are so high. The reason is that some of them don’t have what it takes to be able to get some. The EXIM Bank will guarantee for the commercial banks so that they will be able to provide more resources for the SMEs,” he declared.
By Samuel Boadi
samuel10gh@yahoo.com