Soes Prepare to Borrow On Their Own

By Cecil MENSAH

François Pujolas, the French Ambassador to Ghana and Charles Adu Boahen, Deputy Minister of Finance have led a technical workshop on Corporate Governance for State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs).

The event was jointly organized by AFD (Agence Française de Développement) and the Ministry of Finance in Accra.

The objective of the workshop was to strengthen the financial and management capacity of the SOEs in order to increase their capacity to finance their capital expenditure on their own balance sheet without state guarantee.

The workshop also afforded the opportunity for AFD to present its overall strategy and share its experience in other countries in terms of non-sovereign financing as well as the modalities for assessing such funding.

A one-on-one session with the heads of departments and managers was the platform on which the SOEs can glide to kick-start the process. "Despite the fact that public debt must be contained, the country still needs to increase its investment which will serve as a catalyst for growth. This is where this technical workshop on Corporate Governance becomes relevant in creating the right platform for SOEs to be able to borrow on their own balance sheet without State guarantee becomes crucial to secure Ghana's future economic development", the Ambassador stated.

According a statement released by the French Embassy in Accra on the new development for SOEs, Yvonne Quansah, Director at the External Resources Mobilization Department of Ministry of Finance, stated also stated with the kind of robust economic environment Ghana should not stop the SOEs from taking centre stage in the government's quest to reduce public debt.

The workshop was facilitated by experts from the Operations Department of the AFD Head Office, alongside the Program Managers from the Centre for Financial Economic and Banking Studies, which is AFD's Corporate University (CEFEB). The capacity building workshop was organised on the framework of the "France in Ghana 1957-2017: Moving forward together."

The initiative forms part of the many programmes that the French Embassy intends using to celebrate the 60 of bilateral relations between France and Ghana.

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