THE Volta Region Trade, Investment and Cultural Fair opened in Ho on Monday with a call on entrepreneurs to add value to their products in order to attract new customers.
Dr Bernard Glover, a Member of Council of State, who made the call, said computerised value-added products were the emerging trends in world business and tourism landscape and the nation should not wait for multi-national companies to dictate development trends.
The theme of the fair is: ‘Volta Region: Investors’ Destination”.
Dr Glover said many Ghanaians abroad were looking for opportunities to channel their expertise and capital into investment, adding that investors and their partners only showed interest where their capital could be invested and harvested safely.
In a keynote address, the Minister of Tourism, Mrs Zita Okaikoi, promised that the ministry would champion the packaging of the tourism potential in the Volta Region.
She expressed the hope that the fair would help mobilise the potentials for stimulating growth, job and wealth-generation in the region, adding that the fair must be able to stimulate growth at all levels of society and be capable of redistributing income among low and high income earners, as well as between rural and urban population.
The minister said with the desired push and the needed political support, the Volta Region would become the tourism hub of the country, stating that the potential that existed in the region was so high and varied that the ministry could not ignore investment in certain areas.
“The presence of waterfalls, caves, mountains, lakes, lagoons, rivulets, and the sea, as well as the forests and savannah grasslands in the region, makes it a unique and diverse tourism destination,” she said.
Mrs Okaikoi asked chiefs not to underrate the importance of domestic tourism because it was a platform for the redistribution of income from urban to the rural areas, adding that the tourism sector had mapped out the West Africa sub-region as a domestic market and, therefore, determined to lead in the crusade to make Ghana a preferred tourism destination in West Africa.
She appealed to financial institutions to open joints at tourism sites to enable foreign visitors to access at least ATM facilities there.
The chairman of the Board of Directors of the Agriculture Development Bank (ADB), Mr Ibrahim Adam, said the bank had opened five new branches in the Volta Region and said that was in recognition of the enormous agriculture and tourism potential the region was endowed with.
He added that the opening of the branches was a testimony that the bank was ready to be ahead of time on agricultural development in the Volta Region and promised that the ADB would not divorce itself from the region in view of the initiative by the people to take their destiny in their own hands.
Mr Adams announced that the ADB would establish 75 branches throughout the country by the middle of next year and called on chiefs to identify aspects of culture that would be marketable to the outside world for the bank to consider a partnership in investing in those cultural aspects.
He presented a dummy cheque for GH¢10,000 to the Volta Region Co-ordinating Council in support of the Volta Fair.
In a welcoming address, the Volta Regional Minister, Mr Joseph Amenowode, said the Volta Region, and Ghana as a whole, could not improve upon its economic fortunes if the people did not rise up to the challenge of marshalling all resources for their development.
“ How can God bless our homeland and make us great and strong if we ourselves do not lend our total commitment to the development agenda of our region?” he questioned.
Solidarity messages came from representatives of the Ghana Investment Promotion Centre (GIPC), Volta Foundation, National Board for Small Scale Industries (NBSSI) and the Office of the Chief of Staff.
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