GNBCC's New Year's Cocktail

26-01-2024

GNBCC's New Year's Cocktail

Yesterday we welcomed almost 60 people from 25 of our Member companies and organisations  to our New Year’s Cocktail. This included our Ambassador Mr Jeroen Verheul as well as our Board Chair Mr Kofi Polley. GNBCC welcomed our guests on our refurbished terrace with freshly painted walls. Around 18:30 the General Manager Tjalling Wiarda gave the New Year’s speech after which he toasted to the New Year and wished all the Members Afeheya Pa ! Below is his New Year’s Speech.

Dear GNBCC Members ,

Welcome to our New Year’s Cocktail. We can look back on a successful year with a Member increase to almost  110 members hence on a solid return to pre-covid numbers. In 2023 our financial recovery continued with a 2nd year of sound healthy result figures written in black instead of covid red.

On a professional level we are proud on our collaboration with the Netherlands Embassy which also benefits a great number of our Members. 2023 saw the dawn of the Horticulture Business Platform (HBP)  , an important sub project under the umbrella of  the Private Sector Development (PSD) project.  HBP is of strategic importance to the Embassy (and us) that it hopefully becomes an independent project with its own budget next to PSD. As a result there will be more room for development of other  projects under the PSD umbrella. Next to the horticulture focus our PSD project is also targeting women in business, the diaspora and the youth. For this last ambition GNBCC has been successfully working in 2023 with the Ghana Food Movement on the Youth in Food project, stimulating opportunities for the youth in food and horticulture.

We also started cooperation in 2023 with IMANI to execute  a research under our Members concerning the investment climate in Ghana; the results will be expected this spring after which we will present our conclusions and recommendations to the government. In this way we hope to have a positive contribution to the struggle of improving the Ghana business climate. We ended 2023 with our annual business breakfast for our Premium Members ; here IMANI presented the 1st preliminary results of our survey.

Last year we also organised a great number of cocktails and our  annual flagship event with our colleagues from South Africa (GSABC) and this your also our brothers from Belgium (GBBC) ; it was held at our ambassador’s residence and again we broke new records in amount of guests. We are getting more & more famous for the good reasons of enjoyment & networking !

We will continue our progress in 2024 – we issued a member survey in December 2023 and were content to find out that our Membership satisfaction scoring rate was 76% . GNBCC remains a Member organisation headed by our Board under the leadership of Mr Kofi Polley who took over the helm half way 2023 from Cindy Noordermeer. 

2023 saw also the start of a somewhat regular range of articles on doing business in Ghana published on Linked In by myself and republished on GNBCC’s social media as well as in our Newsletter. A lot of positive feedback has been created with these articles plus more visibility for GNBCC .

2024 will be a challenging year due to the elections at the end of this year. This year no improvements of the business climate are expected due to the financial shortages.  There are many challenges that lie ahead for Ghana as it proceeds with its recovery process under the IMF program. Due to the program's conditions, the fiscal space will be severely constrained, leading to economic difficulties. It has been evident for some time that the government will implement an aggressive revenue mobilization campaign. We urge members to be prepared as the government will be rolling out a series of new taxes and the GRA will probably make several visits to your company.

Business operations are likely to face significant challenges due to the power challenges caused by indebtedness to power producers. We predict that the government will raise utility tariffs to pay off its debts, which will have a major impact on the cost of doing business. Added are the problems within the cocoa industry such as the cocoa shortages which halted cocoa processors as well as  the expected introduction of import restrictions on essential food products such as rice, offal, poultry, cooking oil, fruit juices, noodles, pasta, fish, sugar and canned tomatoes. These import restrictions have the potential to escalate food prices potentially threatening food security.  Given the uncertain economic conditions and the electioneering period, we understand the complexities in planning your business operations, but we believe that these issues are temporary and 2025 will be better.

We as GNBCC remain committed to improve and work on a better Ghana because we believe in Ghana.

With a strong Board plus Management & Staff plus enthousiastic active Members GNBCC can continue to grow to  remain one of the leading Business Councils in Ghana.

I want to raise the glass on 2024 and say Afeheya Pa and good luck.

Thanks

GNBCC | News