By Love Wilhelmina Abanonave
Ghana’s Deputy Minister for Trade, Agribusiness, and Industry, Sampson Ahi, has noted that, garment industry players continue to face constraints across the trade value chain, including customs and clearance procedures, compliance requirements, logistics bottlenecks, and underutilization of trade facilitation schemes.
According to him, these challenges increase the cost of doing business, prolong turnaround times, and weaken the sector’s competitiveness in both regional and global markets.
He made the comments during a Public-Private Dialogue on Textile and Garment Trade Facilitation Challenges at Sogakope in collaboration with TradeMark Africa (TMA).
He also reaffirmed Government’s commitment to addressing trade facilitation bottlenecks affecting Ghana’s textile and garment industry, describing the sector as a strategic pillar of the country’s industrialization and export diversification agenda.
Mr. Ahi assured participants that recommendations emerging from the dialogue would inform future policy actions, strengthen institutional coordination, and guide targeted reforms to improve the trade environment for the garments industry.
In her remarks, the Director for West Africa and AfCFTA at TradeMark Africa, Ms. Harriet Gayi, underscored the urgency of implementing practical and evidence-based trade facilitation reforms to reposition Ghana as a competitive garment manufacturing hub in West Africa.
She noted that although Ghana’s garment industry has experienced a significant decline from its historic peak, recent interventions including the rapid production of over 14 million facemasks during the COVID-19 pandemic — demonstrated the sector’s resilience and untapped industrial capacity when policy and private sector efforts are aligned.
Ms. Gayi outlined persistent bottlenecks such as customs system downtimes, port hour misalignments, documentation delays, and early gate closures, which reduce production days, increase costs, and undermine investor confidence. She commended the Ministry’s structured and evidence-based approach, including the advance circulation of proposed reform measures aimed at increasing production days, reducing reliance on air freight, strengthening export reliability, lowering costs, and attracting investment.
She further indicated that private sector players are ready to scale operations to a 24-hour, three-shift production model once a predictable and enabling environment is secured. Strengthened collaboration with institutions such as the Ghana Standards Authority, she added, would further enhance product quality and export competitiveness.
Both speakers emphasized that improving trade facilitation in the garment sector goes beyond efficiency gains. With women and youth forming the backbone of the workforce, streamlined trade systems would directly translate into increased production, expanded orders, sustainable job creation, and broader economic inclusion.
