By Francis Ntow
Accra, Aug. 16, GNA – Five Nordic countries have committed to strengthening relations with Ghana to increase trade and investments with the West African nation.
The five countries; Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden, as part of their official visit to Ghana to explore mutually beneficial partnerships, engaged some young entrepreneurs in Accra, on Wednesday, August 14.
The engagement was to identify opportunities and challenges as well as areas of partnerships in innovation, technology, entrepreneurship, and sustainability.
Speaking at a Nordic-Ghana Innovation and Entrepreneurship dialogue, Mr Lars Lꟁkke Rasmussen, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Denmark, said there was a common interest between Ghana and its counterparts from the five Nordic countries.
Such interest, he said, required a functioning partnership to boost entrepreneurship, trade, and investment, with a focus on minimising the risks associated with access to capital to support the growth of young businesses.
“We would like to see more investment from our countries in Africa and the vice versa, because there are huge potentials and we need to identify them,” Mr Rasmussen, said.
He called for an inclusive development system, which ensured that the ideas and aspirations of young Ghanaian entrepreneurs were integrated into a broader strategic framework for economic growth.
That, he said, would create a congenial environment to enable businesses of young Ghanaians to thrive to create the needed jobs and support economic diversification and transformation.
In an interview with the Ghana News Agency, Miss Bjꟁrg Sandkjaer, the State Secretary for International Development for Norway, underscored the essence of the visit.
“The visit by the group, the first of its kind, is to build on the foundations of the individual countries with Ghana in strengthening cooperation, identify and leverage opportunities, as well as increase trade and investment,” she said.
Having listened to the stories of some young Ghanaian entrepreneurs, Ms Sandkjaer, described their businesses as “inspiring”.
She said that the innovations and businesses of the young Ghanaian entrepreneurs had opportunities that the five Scandinavian countries could benefit from, adding that “we’ve seen solutions that we also need back home.”
Ms Cordie Aziz, the Executive Director of Environment360, an enterprise which provides plastic waste solutions, called for a friendly atmosphere to enable exchanges between Ghanaian businesses and other foreign ones.
She noted that often than not, young businesses struggled to get visas into foreign countries, which limited their operations, explaining that not all business transactions and knowledge exchanges could be done effectively online.
“There’s something about face-to-face interactions and that opportunity to better understand what others are doing and how they’re doing it, and learning processes that cannot be done online, but it’s often difficult to get visas,” she lamented.
Ms Aziz called on foreign embassies to make it easier for young entrepreneurs to have visas to participate in exchange programmes, which always brought about shared socio-economic benefits.
Darlington Akogo, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Minohealth AI Labs, an Artificial Intelligence health solutions provider, called for proper interfacing between the government and young businesses.
GNA