Natural Resources Governance expert, Dr. Steve Manteaw, is bemoaning the failure of the One District One Factory (IDIF) initiative under the former administration to link its industrialization agenda to the local content policy in the country’s mining sector.
The flagship 1D1F industrialization drive was touted as a transformational initiative meant to stimulate local production, create jobs, and reduce the country’s dependency on imports.
But Dr. Steve Manteaw says the initiative missed a crucial golden opportunity of leveraging Ghana’s vibrant mining sector through a deliberate local content strategy.
While 1D1F was designed to establish factories across all districts, it was rolled out without alignment to the local procurement policy in mining, which required mining firms to source a range of inputs and services from Ghanaian suppliers.
As a result, despite the existence of the local content law creating an already existing market, mining companies, suppliers, and subcontractors of the mining industry import these goods from China, creating jobs outside the Ghanaian economy.
This disconnect, Dr. Manteaw argues, stemmed from a lack of coherence between the country’s mining policy and trade policy.
“It’s just unimaginable that we had an ambitious industrialization programme – one-district-one-factory – which was in no way linked to the local content opportunities in mining. This happened because of misalignment between the content and direction of the state’s mining policy and its trade policy,” he lamented in a post cited by The High Street Journal.
“So the mining procurement list, which was intended to encourage the development of the Ghanaian manufacturing capability to supply to the local mining industry, and through that create jobs for the teeming youth of this country, has not achieved its purpose. The added benefit of reducing the forex pressures that imports bring to bear on the Ghanaian economy has also been lost on us,” he added.
He argues that the factories under the 1D1F programme were neither incentivized nor positioned to tap into the demand created by mining companies for locally produced goods.
As a result, beyond job losses, the economic cost has been steep. With mining firms continuing to import inputs that could have been locally manufactured under a well-aligned 1D1F framework, Ghana continues to face foreign exchange pressures, draining its reserves and deepening trade imbalances.
Nevertheless, Dr. Manteaw remains hopeful. He is elated that the thinking within the current government is to change the dominant negative narrative around the governance of our natural resources in ways that unleash their developmental and economic potential.
However, he believes the government must “push harder to align its industrialization agenda with the local content policy in mining to make the change happen.”
Dr. Manteaw’s call serves as a wake-up call emphasizing that without policy alignment, even the most well-intentioned programmes will fall short.
