The government has been advised to urgently explore other diplomatic sources of financing apart from the United States and draw some money from the Ghana Stabilisation Fund (GSF).
This is to help reduce the burden particularly on Ghana’s health sector, which has suffered a US$78.2 million out of a total of US$156m funding gap created by the withdrawal of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) support.
Professor John Gatsi, the Dean, University of Cape Coast (UCC) Business School, said this in an exclusive interview with the Ghana News Agency.
This comes on the back of President John Dramani Mahama’s directive to the Finance Minister, Dr Cassiel Ato Forson, to take immediate actions to close the funding gap.
He said the situation called for “critical thinking into exploring all avenues of financing the needs of our people. The first thing that should be happening now is to broaden our scope of engagement within the diplomatic communities.”
“The Government must scale-up what we get from Norway, UK, and other countries, and even countries that have not been supporting us. This is the time to be aggressive in contacting them to see how they can scale up their support to Ghana,” Prof Gatsi said.
He called for a strategic collaboration between the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in achieving that goal.
A leaked memo in the international cycles has indicated a restoration of USAID support to some “strategic countries,” but it remains unknown if Ghana is part of those.
Prof Gatsi said while the country waited to get more details on the “strategic countries,” it could draw some money from the Ghana Stabilisation Fund, which receives 30 per cent of the country’s petroleum revenue.
The Reconciliation Report on the Petroleum Holding Fund presented to Parliament by the Finance Ministry showed that at the end of 2023, the closing balance of the Fund was US$190.38 million.
“The Stabilisation Fund under the Petroleum Revenue Management tells us that we can take some money from that Fund to support the economy in terms of acute difficulty. So, we should be targeting to get some money to support the economy regarding this shortfall,” he said.
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