Unlocking the dev't potential of the savannah zone

In every country, as is the case with every continent, some territories are bound to be more developed than others.

This is to be expected, given that the natural resource allocation of every country will not always be even throughout its regions, districts and cities.

This uneven distribution of natural resources and the direct impact it has on development adds to other economic factors, which help to make it unfavourable for businesses to locate there.

Given that business locations and investments have direct impact on the socio-economic advancement of an area, these places, where natural conditions combine with human factors to discourage investors from setting up, are bound to lack behind in development.

This has been the plight of the country's savannah zone, which covers 63 districts in five regions.

This has, over the years, discouraged most investors from setting up their operations in the area.

A GRAPHIC BUSINESS analysis of investments inflows into the country and their distinction throughout the country showed that the area is still the lest fanciful for investors seeking places to locate their businesses.

The data, pieced together from various documents from the Ghana Investment Promotion Council (GIPC), showed that out of the 722 investment projects registered with the GIPC between 2013 and the first nine months of this year, only 29 projects, representing 4.02 per cent of the period's total, were located in the savannah zone (refer to story on Page 3).

Although this trend is not surprising to us at the Graphic Business, we believe that it reveals the country's inability to market the economic potential of the zone to investors, who would have hitherto helped to unlock those potentials.

Beyond the arable land in the zone, where manufacturing companies in agro-processing and related fields could have easily taken advantage of to expand their operations, the area’s nearness to neighboring countries shows that investors could easily use it as a stepping stone to expand their operations into foreign markets.

This adds to the relatively cheap human resource available in the area, which ultimately means that companies operating there would, all things being equal, have relatively lower overhead costs compared to their counterparts in the Sahel region.

Sadly, however, the country has not been able to capitalise on these advantages and many more offered by the savannah zone to attract investments into the area.

Much as the paper sees this to be a daunting task for the authorities concerned, we believe that it is not a task beyond us as a country.

The paper is optimistic that the Savannah Accelerated Development Authority (SADA), an independent and autonomous corporation tasked with the comprehensive and long-term development of the zone, could combine its energies and expertise with the GIPC and other state agencies to comprehensively market the zone to potential investors.

This could be done in conjunction with policy directives, which should be skewed towards attracting investments into the zone.

These initiatives could include special industrial parks through the region, tax incentives or breaks for businesses and special funding for local entrepreneurs that come out with innovative and viable business plans.

These initiatives would then complement the area's competitive advantage to help lure investors into the zone.

While this happens, various stakeholders in the area could then step up their publicity efforts to help change the old narrative which has it that the area is far, isolated, hot and full of conflicts. GB