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Suame Magazine should be assisted to
develop - Deputy Minister
Accra, Feb. 16, GNA -The Kumasi Suame Magazine Metal Works
and Vehicle Repair Cluster should be given the necessary
assistance to unearth its potential and accelerate the path
towards sustainable industrial development, Dr Anthony Akoto
Osei, Deputy Minister of Finance and Economic Planning, said
on Friday.
He said the Cluster had the potential to develop into a
successful case in Africa and even generate foreign exchange
through exports if given the needed support.
The Suame Magazine, formed spontaneously in the 1930s, is a
cluster of artisans engaged in vehicle repairs and metal
works with over 12,000 enterprises and more than 100,000
artisans most of whom are the young.
Speaking at a day's dissemination workshop on Cluster-based
Industrial Development in Accra, Dr Osei said developing
countries like Ghana, which were well endowed with labour
and had comparative advantage in labour-intensive industries
under competitive conditions, had immense capacity to
generate employment opportunities for the poor.
The workshop was organised by the Ministry of Finance and
Economic Planning for various participants drawn from the
European Union, Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA),
UN Educational, Scientiic and Cultural Organisation
(UNESCO), UN Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO) and
entrepreneurs from the Suame Magazine to disseminate
findings of a research carried out between December 2004 and
March 2005 on activities of the Kumasi Suame Magazine.
Dr Osei said enterprises in a cluster like that of Suame had
the potential to create wealth, generate employment
opportunities and reduce poverty.
This is because each enterprise could take advantage of the
benefits from agglomeration such as learning from each
other, easy access to workers with requisite skills and
transacting intermediate goods with others easily.
He described the Suame Cluster as a major source of skill
formation and employment, especially for the youth, saying
activities being carried out there directly fell in line
with the National Youth Employment Programme (NYEP).
He therefore urged the participants and all stakeholders
including development partners to take keen interest in the
research findings and come out with suggestions that would
help improve the status of activities being undertaken by
the artisans in the interest of the country.
Dr Alhassan Iddrisu of the Policy Analysis and Research
Department of the MOFEP said the findings revealed that
artisans with high levels of formal education or training
had higher shares of sales to traders and companies, higher
machining cost shares and lower share of working time for
materials search and procurement and higher value added.
He explained that such entrepreneurs were more likely to
process their products through machining to obtain high
value goods and to market their goods through improved
marketing sources such as traders' companies and own retail
shops.
Dr Iddrisu dismissed the view that Africans were not
motivated to industrialise, saying various profitable
attempts had been made but these unfortunately, had not led
to remarkably rapid industrial growth as experienced in East
Asia.
He recommended that development assistance in the form of
transfer of technical and managerial knowledge should be
provided to potential innovative entrepreneurs.
GNA
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