Our position is that Ghana’s next material gain in job security and development is available largely by finishing administrative work already identified, rather than by launching a new grand strategy. Large, multi-year interventions — new industrial policy, new financing facilities, new sector strategies — are useful, but they are not where the fastest impact sits today.
We point to three actions as achievable in the near term. First, we recommend clearing legacy arrears between the utilities, Independent Power Producers, and government, which has an outsized effect on sector liquidity and, in turn, on IPPs’ and contractors’ ability to retain staff and pay local suppliers on time — a jobs effect that is immediate and measurable, unlike most industrial policy, which takes years to show up in employment data. Second, we recommend converting local content requirements from a static percentage target into the capability-building schedule we have set out elsewhere — with specific, time-bound technical skills transferred into Ghanaian firms — turning a compliance obligation already on the books into a direct jobs and skills outcome, without requiring new legislation, only better-specified contract terms on agreements already being negotiated or renewed. Third, we continue to recommend ring-fencing preventive road-maintenance funding, a position we have set out previously, to protect the local contracting jobs tied to routine maintenance work that are typically the first casualty of budget pressure, before those jobs are lost and the underlying asset deteriorates into a far more expensive reconstruction job later.
None of these three actions require new policy design, new legislation, or new financing instruments — they require political will to finish implementing decisions and requirements already in place. That, in our view, is the fastest available route from current policy to a measurable effect on jobs and development outcomes.
AFR