The International Trade Centre (ITC) is preparing to scale its technical and sector-specific support to Ghana after its Executive Director, Pamela Coke-Hamilton and Trade, Agribusiness and Industry Minister Elizabeth Ofosu-Adjare met in Geneva on the sidelines of UNCTAD XVI to align on trade competitiveness, women-led exports, and value-added manufacturing.
Coke-Hamilton praised Ghana’s early leadership on Geographical Indications for Kente, which she called a bold defence of cultural IP, and cited the Sankofa Project and the SheTrades Ghana Hub as proof that targeted interventions can scale when domestic institutions execute well.
She flagged new ITC programmes covering automotive components, textiles and apparel, infant-formula production, coffee, and the shea value chain, urging Ghana to secure G.I. protection for shea and to position itself as a continental hub for those sectors under AfCFTA rules.
Ofosu-Adjare said Ghana’s policy frameworks for textiles, automotive, pharmaceuticals, and agribusiness industrialisation are “ready to run” and welcomed the infant-formula initiative on the basis of local cereal supply and firms such as Yedent that can anchor processing capacity.
She framed the 24-Hour Economy Plus Policy as a labour-absorption instrument, “one job, one shift, one opportunity”, and noted that recasting the ministry to explicitly include agribusiness signals a deliberate shift to value-addition and export diversification.
The Minister credited ITC with strengthening Ghana Export Promotion Authority (GEPA) and the Ghana Standards Authority (GSA) and proposed functional expansions, localisation of ITC/WTO help desks for SMEs and exporters, standards-and-packaging training for export-ready firms, support to digitalisation and AI adoption for youth and women, and instruments for finance access and green-transition readiness.
The engagement reflects a broader move in Geneva to convert narrative alignment on AfCFTA, digital trade, and industrial upgrading into executable pipelines, in sectors where product credibility, standards compliance, IP protection, and scale-ready firms determine who captures value in the next phase of market integration.
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