Ghana's next step in peaceful use of atomic energy

Ghana’s energy officials and their counterparts from Russia’s State Atomic Energy Corporation (ROSATOM) have held the first meeting to prepare for the implementation of Ghana’s nuclear power program.

The Joint Coordinating Committee (JCC) meeting is part of implementation of the 2015 Intergovernmental Agreement on the peaceful use of atomic energy.

The meeting agenda included all key issues related to the nuclear program, including infrastructure, staff training, financing, technical issues related to construction of facilities for the joint projects and regulation in the nuclear power industry.

The parties also discussed practical aspects of cooperation in the form of task groups between JCC meetings.

According to Viktor Polikarpov, ROSATOM Regional Vice-President of Sub-Saharan Africa, "although there are no nuclear power plants, Ghana has competences in nuclear technology, and the country understands that the development of peaceful nuclear power is necessary”.

Ghana is developing the National Nuclear Power Program and has conducted self-assessment of its nuclear infrastructure in accordance with the IAEA standards.

The country is also preparing to accept the first INIR mission of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

“In the long term, Ghana may be expected to become one of the countries that make use of nuclear power. This will help overcome energy shortage, as well as provide a necessary impetus for economic development in the country," said Mr. Polikarpov.

Director General of the Ghana Atomic Energy Commission, Professor Benjamin Nyarko, has argued that nuclear energy offers the opportunity to grow greener economies and for Ghana to conform to the new Paris Agreement on climate change.

In spite of the benefits, he says the country is not in a rush to compromise on safety standards.

The next meeting of the countries' representatives is to be held during the IAEA General Conference in September, while the second JCC meeting will take place in 2017.

World Bank and Global Fund commit $24billion to accelerate universal health coverage in Africa

African heads of state and partners have vowed to accelerate progress toward universal health coverage (UHC) in Africa.

To help countries implement their health reforms, the World Bank and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria (Global Fund) have committed to invest $24 billion in Africa over the next three to five years.

The announcement was made ahead of the Sixth Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD-VI), which is Japan’s flagship program for African development.

One of the focal points at this year’s conference is expanding UHC in Africa.

“African countries can become more competitive in the global economy by making several strategic investments, including investing more in their people, their most prized resource,” said Jim Yong Kim, President of the World Bank Group. “A critical part of this commitment is to accelerate progress on universal health coverage—ensuring that everyone, everywhere has the opportunity to live a healthy and productive life.”

The World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), together with the government of Japan, Japan International Cooperation Agency, the Global Fund, and the African Development Bank also launched UHC in Africa: A Framework for Action, which provides a big-picture view of UHC in the region.

It also identifies key areas that will be critical to achieving better health outcomes, such as financing, service delivery, targeting vulnerable populations, mobilizing critical sectors and political leadership.

“At the G7 Ise-Shima Summit in May, bearing this TICAD in mind, I took initiative in leading the discussion on reinforcing the global health architecture, which will strengthen responses to public health emergencies, and on promoting UHC, which will also contribute to crisis preparedness," said Shinzo Abe, Prime Minister of Japan. "‘UHC in Africa’ will present guidelines and concrete framework for action that will serve as references for achieving UHC under the ownership of respective countries, as well as by cooperation among the international society.”

The funding announcements by the World Bank and Global Fund are one of several steps in the years ahead toward UHC in Africa.

To that end, the government of Japan will support the World Bank and WHO’s annual report to track UHC progress in Africa. The World Bank and WHO have agreed to hold in 2017 in Tokyo a high-level annual meeting on monitoring progress toward UHC in Africa.

Through its International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and International Development Association windows, the World Bank Group expects to contribute $15 billion in the next five years to investments that are critical to UHC, including through the Global Financing Facility, the Power of Nutrition, early childhood development, pandemic preparedness, targeting the poor, crisis preparedness and response, and leveraging the private sector. The commitment assumes a successful IDA 18 replenishment. 

The Global Fund’s $9 billion commitment for 2017 through 2019 includes $6 billion of investments in programs that treat and prevent HIV, TB and malaria, and also includes $3 billion of investments in systems for health such as strengthened procurement systems and supply chains, improved data quality and data management systems, and strengthened human resources for health. The commitment assumes a $13 billion Global Fund replenishment, which launches in September 2016. 

“Reducing and preventing HIV, TB and malaria is critically important to alleviate the burden on health systems, but in order to accelerate universal health coverage and all of the health SDGs, we also are actively investing to build resilient and sustainable systems for health,” said Mark Dybul, Executive Director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

Although the evidence is clear that investing in health pays dividends for countries, challenges remain in the delivery and financing of health care.

“In 2014, African countries spent about $126 billion of domestic funding for health, and WHO estimates that an additional $65 to $115 billion in domestic funding can be mobilised annually over the next ten years,” said Margaret Chan, Director-General of the World Health Organization. “WHO is working with countries in Africa to generate those funds and help them shape the policies that will put them to best use.”

The World Bank Group, government of Japan and private sector partners recently launched the Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility, an innovative, fast-disbursing global financing mechanism designed to protect the world against deadly pandemics, which will create the first-ever insurance market for pandemic risk. It also will promote greater global and national investments in preparing for future outbreaks and strengthening national health systems.

Onslaught of galamsey on mining concessions in Ghana, a threat to investor confidence

Mining industry watchers have posited that Ghana’s gold mining sector could collapse if the trend of illegal miners encroaching on concessions of mining companies is not halted. 

According to the Ghana Mineworkers Union (GMWU), the spate of illegal miners taking over concessions is a scare to the investor community.

General-Secretary of the Union, Prince William Ankrah describes as “shameful and barbaric” the uncontrollable levels of the galamsey onslaught on the concessions of legally registered businesses.

“Mining companies such as AngloGold Ashanti, Obuasi Mine witnessed a gruesome attack by illegal small scale miners on its concession, resulting in the death of a top management staff of the company. Again, Owere Mines in Konongo was also not spared in this nefarious enterprise as these hoodlums invaded and took control of the Mine's concession for weeks, while owners and our members watched helplessly,” he observed.

The gradual take-over of the Obuasi mine by the illegal operators forced AngloGold Ashanti to file a suit against the Government of Ghana at the International Court of Arbitration, seeking protection on its concession.

Prince Ankrah describes the development as unfortunate, emphasizing that “Obuasi is a major asset to our nation and for that matter we all need to be careful so that we don’t create any scare that will allow that mine to remain dead even though it’s a rich resource”.

The Anglogold Ashanti, Obuasi Mine, currently undergoing operational reforms, is said to viable, hence the need for all stakeholders to be on board for its resuscitation.

The Minerals Commission recently constituted a District Mining Committee at Obuasi to oversee the peaceful exit of the unlicensed miners from AGA concession to the demarcated areas within the lease area surrendered by the company.

The move is expected to forestall what interest groups have described as a near-crisis situation at Obuasi. 

Chairman of the Committee, Engineer Kwaku Frimpong Kuma, was part of a team that set up underground operations about 20years ago within the area of Anglogold’s concession under contest.

He is confident the committee’s work will yield the requisite results to the satisfaction of both interest parties.

“At this stage, it’s going to be a win-win situation…it will be solved to the joy of both parties and then Obuasi will come back to life,” he stated.

Prince William Ankrah is also hopeful the new arrangements will be workable to help bring a closure to the menace of illegal miners taking over the concession of Anglogold Ashanti.

“Let’s hope that it will yield the needed results…let’s all be confident that it will work out,” he said. “It’s evident that Obuasi can bounce back and remain very vibrant for the economy, so that’s what we want to see and we pray that really materialize”.

The Ghana Mineworkers Union, has however, stated that it will not hesitate to withdraw labour services to the industry all over the country if the menace of illegal mining and the threat to the safety and security of members is left unchecked.

“Considering the pace and nature of the destruction by illegal small scale mining and its consequences on the environment, it would be extremely difficult to bequeath anything meaningful to generations yet unborn if we continue on this indiscriminate tangent with impunity,” said Prince Ankrah.

By Kofi Adu Domfeh

Raise the standards of who becomes President of Ghana – says Prof. Adei

Ghana’s electoral system qualifies any Ghanaian who has attained age 40 years, with no criminal record, to contest elections to become the President of the Republic.

This qualification is in accordance to Chapter 8, Article 62 of the 1992 Constitution of Ghana.

But former Rector of the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA), Prof. Stephen Adei, says the standards need to be raised for individuals who attempt to lead the country as President.

“To become a president of Ghana, you need only three things; you must be 40years, speak English and not mad,” he posited.

He however says the importance of the position of President demands additional qualifications, especially moral integrity, of anyone seeking to be the first gentleman of the land.

“We must raise the standards but we must also not say that unless you have PhD from London University you cannot become the President of Ghana,” said Prof. Adei.

He was speaking at the 53^rd Annual Session of the Ghana Baptist Convention at Ejura in the Ashanti region. The theme was “Harvest Time Today: Achieving the Great Commission through Human Resource Development”.

Executive President of the Convention, Rev. Dr. Ernest Adu-Gyamfi said the award of honorary doctoral degrees is becoming ‘a national epidemic, especially when such honorary doctorate degrees appear to be on sale”.

“I’ll therefore want to encourage and admonish our ministers and all our members to pursue real academic studies so that you can talk and walk out boldly as recipients of accredited earned degrees,” he stated.

By Kofi Adu Domfeh

Era of paying lip service to climate commitments is over – says PACJA

The Pan African climate Justice Alliance (PACJA) has again brought the world’s attention to Africa as thousands of movements from across the globe gathered in Montreal, Canada for the 2016 World Social Forum.

The goal of the WSF 2016 is to gather people from groups in civil society, organizations and social movements who want to build a sustainable and inclusive world, where every person and every people has its place and can make its voice heard.

The 2016 Forum is with an overarching theme: “Another World Is Possible”.

MithikaMwenda, Secretary-General of PACJA, in his submission at the Forum, called for global solidarity among civil society organizations to ensure that they hold governments accountable to their commitments in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Paris Agreement on Climate Change.

“The era of paying lip service to commitments governments signed up to is over, especially  in the light of Paris Agreement that have spelt out clear role for all Parties in the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), everyone and all Parties now have a role to play,” said Mithika.

Besides joining the global march organized by the Forum, PACJA made a case for Africa on several burning issues at various events at the Forum.

These include Climate Justice and the Fight For Peoples’ Right to Food, Water and Land; Transforming the Energy Systems for People and Communities; Climate Justice, Land Rights and Food Security in Africa in the context of Paris Agreement and Sustainable Development Goals; Implementation of SDGs, Accountability and the Role of Civil Society Organizations.

The Alliance called on world leaders to listen to the voices of the people and ACT NOW in the interest of the planet and save the world from further humanitarian and environmental crisis.

“To achieve the goal of keeping the global temperature rise to well below 2⁰C and pursuing efforts to keeping it below 1.5⁰C as enshrined in the Paris Agreement and to further achieve the objective of the SDGs, it will require a lot of sacrifices in the way we live,” said Samson Samuel Ogallah of PACJA. “The sacrifice will require switching from the current unsustainable production and consumption lifestyle especially by the industrialized countries as the business as usual scenario will lead the world to a 3⁰C and above scenario by 2030 thereby eroding any gain that may have been made from the implementation of SDGs by 2030”.

According to Savio Carvalho of the Amnesty International, “Civil society fought hard to get the human rights language into the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), they must now work even harder to ensure its operationalization beyond the adoption of the SDGs by governments across the world”.

Researchers charged to help reduce dependence on imported animal feed

Ghanaian and other researchers in West Africa would have to focus their attention on developing local feeds to reduce dependence on imported feeds to meet demands in animal production.

That’s a call by Professor Oyedapo Fagbenro of the Department of Fisheries and Aquaculture Technology at the Federal university of Technology, Akure, Nigeria.

According to him, increasing the production and availability of cultivated food fish species in West Africa is of significant importance if the human populations are to be adequately fed.

He spoke on the need to reduce, recycle and reuse agro by-products for sustainable animal feed production in West Africa.

“Do we need to import food for humans and then for animals when there are variety of feed materials that are wasted and underutilized?… we have political independence, we should also have nutritional or animal feed industry independence,” he noted.

Prof. Fagbenro was addressing a two-day International Conference on Animal Nutrition in Kumasi, hosted by the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST).

The conference, on the theme “Agro by-products in Animal Feed Production in West Africa”, has the objective of collating a holistic approach to identifying options for optimizing animal protein production.

It attracted scientists, manufacturers and traders in the animal feed industry to share experience on the animal feed value chain to enhance food security and sustainability in animal production.

Vice-Chancellor of the KNUST, Professor Kwasi Obiri-Danso, emphasized the need for scientists, feed manufacturers, processors and practitioners to work together to improve the feed value chain.

He said such move will ensure that “we will all be contributing actively to NEPAD’s call on food and nutrition and Goal 2 of the UN Sustainable Development Goals which is to: end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture”.

Africa’s aquaculture output to the global production remains very low, although there has been remarkable increase globally in the last half century.

Most of the production is attributed to small-scale, semi-intensive farming of tilapia, with few large-scale commercial ventures able to demonstrate long-term economic viability.

In Ghana, aquaculture is a priority to the country’s economic development agenda since it is a major source of protein.

A national policy on aquaculture was adopted in 2013 with the objective of increasing aquaculture production from the current 40,000tons to 130,000tons by 2018.

Experts say meeting the target requires the development of suitable supplementary diets using locally-available plant by-products for most of the fish farmers.

Prof. Steve Amisah of the KNUST says the dwindling population of fish in the wild requires that Ghana would have to focus on fish pond or cage production.

“If you put animals in captivity, then you need to feed them…but we should also make sure that the feed we are giving them is enough to balance all their nutrient requirements, that is why we’re talking about nutrition,” he said.

Prof. Amisah says such feed should enhance the growth of the fish without compromising the economic benefit of the farmer and without polluting the environment.

With funding from the Danish development agency, DANIDA, the Sustainable Fish Feed Project has the aim to improve aquaculture in Ghana by producing cost effective and environmentally friendly fish feed using agro by-products.

This is to help tackle the bottlenecks of high cost of feeds and the environmental impact of high protein feeds.

Prof. Peter Stov from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) says the scientific activities in developing animal feed must be seen to benefit the society and not just academia.

By Kofi Adu Domfeh

Airport Company cautioned against security breaches at entry point

The Ghana Airports Company has been cautioned against compromising the country’s security at the Kotoka International Airport with its ongoing renovation exercise.

Chairman of the Christian Council of Ghana, Rev. Dr. Ernest Adu-Gyamfi, shares an experience of returning from a trip abroad to an airport in darkness.

“When we got into the arrival hall, the whole place was totally dark; immigration officers were using lanterns to process people, and anybody who walks into your country, you cannot take their fingerprints, you cannot take anything and you allow them in,  as far as the security of the country is concerned that is not good,” he observed.

The airport expansion project includes the construction of additional floors and facilities as well as the installation of electrical, mechanical and plumbing works with the goal to ease congestion at the facility.

Rev. Adu-Gyamfi expects the airport company to ensure its standby power generators are running at the point of entry to be able to screen all arrivals in the interest of national security.

He also raised concerns with the long delays in baggage claim on the carousel.

“It takes about an hour and half sometimes waiting for your baggage to arrive; it’s unheard of anywhere,” observed the reverend minister. “Whilst we are expanding the facilities at the arrival hall, we need to look at how do we ensure that the processes of checking through your baggage and bringing them out come as quickly as possible”.

By Kofi Adu Domfeh

False titles and qualifications: Baptist Convention takes steps to clean clergy

The Ghana Baptist Convention says it has put in place measures to thoroughly screen any individual who is accepted to serve as Minister of the Gospel under the Convention.

Executive President of the Convention, Rev. Dr. Ernest Adu-Gyamfi, has described as unacceptable situations where people present false certificates to become pastors.

“Before you’re licensed, recognized or ordained, you go through security checks and we’re working with the security agencies to do these things for us to make sure that anybody that receives our certification is actually somebody that we can vouch for,” he said.

Concerns have been raised recently of the Ghanaian society being flooded with doctorate degrees awarded by unaccredited educational institutions.

Rev. Adu-Gyamfi, who is also Chairman of the Christian Council of Ghana, has indicated that the country’s clergy also has characters wielding educational titles they have not earned.

“Now there are all sorts of people around the country giving doctorate certificates everywhere and people are jumping into them and calling themselves reverend doctors when some of them have not even been to school or done anything,” he expressed.

He added that people will no longer have room to use fake certificates to gain admissions into seminaries.

The Baptist Minister spoke to Tv3 at the 2016 Ministers’ Conference of the Ghana Baptist Convention at Ejura in the Ashanti Region. The theme for the conference is “The Christian Minister, his Character and Attitude”.

Call for peace in Election 2016

As Ghana goes to the polls to elect parliamentarians and a President in December, Rev. Adu-Gyamfi wants Ghanaians to focus on choosing their servant-leaders and not be engaged in acrimonies that breach the peace.

He has cautioned politicians against the practice of making electoral promises which they know cannot be fulfilled.

“If you know that the things you’re promising, you can’t do them, don’t go ahead and be promising the moon. We all know that parliamentarians don’t carry the purse; you don’t have the money, so why do you go round making all kinds of unnecessary promises?” he quizzed.

Former General Secretary of the Christian Council, Rev. Dr. Fred Deegbe, expressed worry at the number of spoilt ballots in previous elections.

He has therefore entreated political actors to educate the electorates to vote appropriately.

“I hope we’ll learn how to vote and vote properly because there is nothing as disturbing as people who go there and spoil the ballots, so that we’ll be ruled by people who are not really our choice,” he noted.

By Kofi Adu Domfeh

Audio Report: Riding Ghana’s economy on bamboo products

Ghana’s bamboo is twice stronger than other species found in the world, according to research by Columbia University.

Bamboo and rattan development in the country can therefore serve as a resource for environmental protection and for income and foreign exchange generation.

The local bamboo bike industry, for instance, is emerging to deliver a sustainable and affordable form of transportation that satisfies local needs and suitable for the European and US export markets.

It is projected that Ghana can generate a billion dollar revenue annually from the export of value added bamboo and rattan products.

However, more concerted efforts are needed for the country to reap the full benefits of processing the abundant non–timber bamboo and rattan forest product for socio-economic development.

The economic value of the product is not yet significant but this could be leveraged if the industry is properly developed.

In this report, Kofi Adu Domfeh examines how bamboo development can help Ghana address problems of climate change, poverty, rural-urban migration and high youth unemployment.

Listen to report...

https://soundcloud.com/kofi-adu-domfeh-1/riding-ghanas-economy-on-bamboo