
Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia
Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia has said the global economic crisis must be a wakeup call to African countries to adopt a technological approach to development, especially as the continent seeks to rebuild and rise from the current crisis.
The Vice-President, who was addressing a high-level African Union-backed “BOMA” event, cautioned against focusing on the short-term symptoms of the current crisis and forgetting the structural issues that the worst-hit countries were confronted with.
The Boma forum brought together global political and business leaders to deliberate on the progress of Africa towards Agenda 2063, the AU’s timetable for transforming Africa into a global economic force.
The Vice-President indicated that the COVID-19 pandemic and the Ukraine conflict had exposed gaps in the world’s economic and political architecture.
He pointed out that these would affect Africa’s quest for growth, if the continent fail to act decisively to build technological industries that are more resilient to global economic shocks.
Nosedive
In his view, countries that depend mostly on primary industries suffer harsher consequences when the global economy takes a nosedive than those that have diversified their economies through higher technology inputs.
“The challenges that have beset the global economy may have been fueled by temporary crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the Ukraine conflict. But these challenges are still a wakeup call to Africa that there are deep structural gaps in the global economic and political architecture that can frustrate its rise, unless serious concerted efforts are made to plug them,” he stated.
The Vice-President said plugging the structural gap requires the African continent to adopt the emerging data-driven, technological approaches to development. According to him, it would help create the right structure for African businesses and SMEs and connect them from isolation, to the world of business.
Dr Bawumia noted that Ghana has chosen to take a path to economic development marked by increasing technological, especially digital, content in its development programs and urged other African countries to emulate same.
Ghana’s path
He further disclosed that Ghana had successfully developed new identity infrastructure that will transform credit scoring for SMEs, remove the bottlenecks in e-commerce and lay the ground for the modernisation of business supportive government services.
“We have totally transformed the financial technology landscape and reworked our mobile telecom industry to enable us take advantage of the 5G revolution and the internet of things as they gather pace.
“No one who has followed our policy journey in Ghana can doubt our total commitment to the technological approach to development,” Dr Bawumia added.