Five participating financial institutions under the One District One Factory (1D1F) Programme have committed various amounts of funds towards some 73 businesses submitted to them by the Secretariat.
On top of the list is EXIM Bank of Ghana, which funded 38 projects, the Agricultural Development Bank, gives conditional approval to 28 projects, GCB Bank has funded the Kete Krachi Timber Recovery Limited Project to harvest submerged trees in the Volta Lake in addition to four others.
Additionally, the UMB and the Standard Chartered Bank have funded one project each.
Mrs Gifty Ohene-Konadu, the National Coordinator of the One District One Factory Programme, announced this on Friday in Accra.She said the factories would be commissioned as and when President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo made time to cut the sod and commission them.
She urged Ghanaians to be optimistic about the programme and be assured that the IDIF “is something that is real and it is going to work”.
Speaking to journalists on the side-lines of a stakeholder engagement involving business enterprises on board the 1D1F programme on the Requirements and Standards, Mrs Ohene-Konadu said, currently, work on the projects was ongoing at various sites all over the country.
Among the stakeholders that participated in the forum were promoters under the 1D1F who have submitted their business plans and whose projects have either been approved and received funding or are in the pipeline and ready to receive funding. The 1D1F Secretariat, in collaboration with the Ghana Standards Authority (GSA), organised the engagement for the participants to discuss issues related to standards, certification and other related matters that affect their upcoming businesses under the 1D1F programme.
Mrs Ohene-Konadu said the achievement of the goal of economic development through industrialisation, would require strict adherence to standards, since it formed the fundamental building blocks for product development. She said standards also helped to establish consistent protocols that could be universally understood and adopted and that would help engender accessibility to both local and international markets, while simplifying product development.
“This is because it is only through the application of standards that the credibility of the new products to be churned out of the factories can be verified. The bottom-line is that the consumers will have confidence that the products are safe, reliable and are of good quality”.
Mrs Ohene-Konadu said if consumers were going to patronise the outputs from the factories, then the Secretariats would depend heavily on various institutions like the GSA, […]
