AfCFTA Secretariat engages Swiss businesses in Ghana on status of continental free trade agreement

The engagement, which had over sixteen Swiss businesses based in Accra and the West African sub-region, formed part of this quarter’s Swiss Business Lunch.

The event was solely dedicated to helping most of these Swiss Businesses with presence in several African economies to receive useful information on the status of implementation of the African Free Trade Project and to be able to discover ways to benefit from and contribute to its success.

Speaking to the Pulse Ghana on the essence of the event, the Swiss Ambassador to Ghana, H.E Simone Giger said it is important for the businesses to know how they can trade beyond Ghana’s borders.

“What we are trying to do through these interactions and making connections between the authorities and the private sector is that we want to make sure that our businesses have this enabling environment so they can thrive and by word of mouth, they will hopefully attract more investments into the country. So that's maybe the ultimate goal of all of that.

At the Swiss Embassy, we organize regular business lunches with the Swiss private sector here in Ghana. We have between 15 and 16 companies in Ghana. Every 3 and 4 months, we gather them and we bring in a keynote speaker. And today we are actually super honored and privileged to have his excellency, the Secretary General of the AfCFTA, Mr Wamkele Mene with us,” she said.

Speaking on how multinational businesses can take advantage of the continental free trade agreement, Cynthia E. Gnassingbe-Essonam, the Senior Advisor for Private Sector Engagement at the AfCFTA Secretariat said that with proper engagements business can thrive with the agreement.

Swiss businesses Pulse Ghana

“So as the secretariat, we have a private sector engagement strategy and we are utilizing different channels basically to engage the private sector. First of all, one of the pillars is sensitization. Businesses need to understand what this agreement is all about and what are the advantages to opportunities and how they can seize those opportunities.

And today we see that there is definitely an interest from the private sector to own this agreement and also to be involved and our role really is to show the opportunities especially in the development of value chains in sectors such as agrobusiness, agro processing, the automotive sector, the pharmaceutical sectors, transport and logistics, where we see the potential in terms of increasing production and increasing intra Africa trade,” she added.

The Swiss Business Lunch event is a quarterly event that is hosted by the Ambassador of Switzerland to Ghana and her deputy providing a platform for networking among all Swiss businesses and operating in Ghana to network and also understand and navigate current economic opportunities and challenges to achieve various business objectives.