Africa loses an estimated $25 billion a year to power outages while exporting raw materials cheaply, Finance Minister Cassiel Ato Forson has said, urging a decisive shift to industrial production.
Speaking at the 12th Ishmael Yamson & Associates Business Roundtable in Accra on Thursday, Forson said unreliable power was a major barrier to productivity and value addition. “We cannot industrialise in darkness,” he told the audience, noting that more than 600 million Africans still lack electricity.
He called it unacceptable that a continent rich in gas, hydro, solar, wind and the critical minerals driving the global energy transition was still debating industrialisation without first securing reliable, affordable power.
Ghana, he said, is targeting 3,000 megawatts of installed generation capacity by 2030, with a significant share coming from renewable sources, a signal of how seriously Accra views the link between energy and industry.
On trade, Forson described the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), projected to add about $450 billion to continental income by 2035 and lift some 30 million people out of extreme poverty, as one of the most consequential economic projects in modern African history. But he warned that an agreement alone cannot create integration; efficient borders, cross-border payments, harmonised regulations and policy coordination are needed to make the roughly $3.4 trillion combined market work for African manufacturers.
He noted that intra-African trade is only about 15 percent of the continent’s total, against nearly 70 percent in Europe and over 50 percent in Asia, and that high cross-border transport costs act as a tax on competitiveness. The goal, he argued, is to refine lithium rather than merely mine it, produce aluminium rather than export bauxite, and process cocoa into finished goods rather than ship beans.
Forson also linked investor confidence to institutional quality, saying investors follow systems, credibility, predictable policy, the rule of law and fiscal discipline, more than resources. He said Ghana remained committed to macroeconomic stability as the foundation for private sector-led growth.
