These are shared government-wide priorities to which each ministry’s work & policies cascades upwards to actualize. The task force is also launched against the backdrop of renewed government commitment to fast track Ghana’s industrialization by leveraging on agriculture which was echoed by the Head of State during the State of the Nation Address to Parliament in February 2018.

The launch meeting provided an opportunity to share with high level policy makers across government ministries, on 3 critical aspects towards actualizing accelerated implementation;

First, convening complementary strengths across different ministries around the strategic thrust of climate proofing & maximizing productivity of Agriculture. A highly catalytic sector capable of accelerating actualization of shared priorities of the vision 2020 & NDCs;

Second, the efficacy of building on on-going work in each of these complementary sectors to minimize duplication which is the biggest operational risk.

Third, leveraging on human capital – the professional skills & networks represented in each of the complementary sectors to bridge gaps in the above – rather that upfront financing.

The taskforce strategic aims & operation: the overarching goal is to bridge policy silos for policy coherence towards creating market enablers for implementation of Ghana’s Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) in the context of actualizing its long-term development blue-print - the vision 2020. Both being shared government-wide priorities. The motivation of the task-force is enhancing the cumulative throughput of sectorial policies towards the above shared priorities by enhancing inter-ministerial policy coherence & synergy towards setting an enabling economy wide policy environment that attracts investments towards a catalytic drive area. Which is establishment of Ecosystems Based Adaptation (EBA)-Driven Agriculture led, clean energy powered industrialization with ICT enabled linkages to market and supply chains as the strategic thrust engine of maximizing both climate & socioeconomic benefits for Ghana. By this, incentivize Ghana’s transition to Low Emissions Development. The approach used;

a)     Builds on existing, planned, ongoing policies & processes within each of the respective complementary ministries rather than starting from scratch. This to lower operational risks and enhance efficiency;

b)    Ensures the realignments in implementing respective ministry policies to create synergy in the above, also drives actualization of each ministries sectorial priorities. This ensures buy-in of the taskforce by all relevant sectorial policy players.  

 Key achievements

Accordingly, the task force has prioritized building on flagship policy processes ongoing in Ghana. Among key ones the 1-District-1-Factory Programme, the Bank of Ghana policy guideline on cooperatives, the Ghana climate smart agriculture policy, the feed-in tariff regulations and the policy objectives of the Ghana Standards Authority (GSA) to ensure quality of Ghana produce for enhanced domestic & export market competitiveness. To this end, the task force is mobilizing policy focal points from ministries representative of agriculture at the core to be complemented by environment (to infuse climate resilience), infrastructure and ICT (for efficient market & supply chain linkages), energy (to power processing & drive agro-manufacturing for wealth creation), representation from the standardization body (expanded markets), finance and cooperatives development (enhance affordable sustainable financing), and planning (integration into long term strategic plans), coherently working towards establishing the economy wide enabling policy environment.

Next steps: leverage on the momentum created by the launch meeting to drive progress in convening complementarities for governmentwide synergy in implementing shared priorities – the vision 2020 & NDCs.

The Ghana EBAFOSA Inter Agency Policy Task Force to focus on the effective & efficient delivery through government wide policy synergy, of shared priorities under the vision 2020 and NDCs through sustainably industrialising its agro-value chains as the strategic thrust engine. This to be realized by combining clean energy development with sustainable agriculture developments as the core of sustainable industry with key enablers in markets, standards & financing. The major aligned initiative to build in is the 1-District-1-Factory Programme. To this end, the following are the key next steps;

1) Domestication of the EBAFOSA compliance standards for enforcement by the Ghana Standards Authority (GSA) to establish market pull factors for the above paradigm.

2) Leveraging on implementation of policy guidelines for cooperatives to incentivize farmer cooperatives to prioritize market financing acquisition of clean energy systems to power agro-value addition & processing enterprise zones as a strategic thrust to implement the 1-district-1 factory programme and accelerate actualizing the Ghana Vision 2020 and NDCs;

3) Maximizing implementation of the Ghana climate smart agriculture policy & the feed-in tariffs by combining implementation of their programmes with the objective to decentralize clean energy to power value addition in climate smart farms as a strategic thrust to actualizing aims of the 1-District-1-factory programme and drive NDCs & vision 2020 implementation.

4) Maximizing the Ghana Feed-in Tariff policy to drive NDCs & vison 2020 by ensuring incentives to scale decentralized clean energy are tied to powering agro-value addition as above.

5) Task force to analyse additional policies in each of the line ministries for additional policy elements that are complementary & synergistic to contribute to drive productivity maximization of the engine of development (agriculture) through sustainably industrializing it as discussed above.

Congratulations to the Government of Ghana for taking its collaboration with UNEP EBAFOSA further to accelerate climate resilient socioeconomic transformation to the benefit of people & planet

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