Ghana must abandon the instinct to spread development resources evenly and instead make deliberate choices about which businesses, sectors and regions to prioritise for concentrated investment, former Power Minister Dr. Kwabena Donkor has argued, saying that every economy Ghana admires today built its foundation by first choosing winners.
Speaking in an exclusive interview with The High Street Journal, Donkor, who holds a doctorate from the University of Bristol and now works as a corporate governance consultant, said the national goal of improving living standards for all Ghanaians remains valid but requires a fundamentally more focused method of execution than Ghana has so far attempted.
“Based on the national imperative of improving the lives of all Ghanaians, we have to start from somewhere,” he said. “In other jurisdictions, countries that today have developed, and we almost envy them, they had to choose winners. You cannot move everybody at a go. So you choose winners.”
The argument challenges a long-standing instinct in Ghanaian economic policy toward broad-based interventions distributed across constituencies, sectors and districts simultaneously, an approach critics have increasingly described as spreading resources too thinly to produce transformational outcomes in any single area.
Donkor’s framework draws on the economic concept of growth poles, a theory associated with the French economist François Perroux, which holds that concentrated investment in specific industries or locations generates spillover effects that eventually pull surrounding areas into productive activity. In practical terms, he argued, a strategically located business hub creates demand for transport, logistics, housing and services, causing smaller enterprises to emerge organically around the anchor investment. “There is going to be a need for other satellite services to serve them. So they become growth pools, as we see in development management,” he said.
The former minister extended the argument to employment policy, challenging the assumption that formal, white-collar jobs represent the primary vehicle for wealth creation among Ghana’s youth. He said entrepreneurship must move to the centre of how Ghana defines economic empowerment, backed by skills training, business development support and mentoring systems that allow young people to learn through practice rather than classroom instruction alone.
Critically, Donkor called for a cultural shift in how Ghana treats business failure. Societies that produce sustained entrepreneurship do not stigmatise early failure, he argued, but treat it as a necessary stage in the development of resilient, innovative businesses. Ghana’s current environment, by contrast, tends to penalise first attempts in ways that discourage repeat efforts and suppress the risk-taking behaviour that generates new enterprise.
The intervention joins a broader conversation in Ghana’s economic policy debate over how to convert macroeconomic stabilisation gains into structural transformation. Donkor has previously argued that manufacturing jobs and agricultural industrialisation are essential to preventing a youth unemployment crisis, and his growth poles argument provides a spatial and institutional framework for where and how those jobs should be created rather than simply asserting that they are necessary.
CDD-Ghana Fellow Dr. Hene Aku Kwapong has separately espoused a similar prioritisation logic, suggesting that the argument is gaining traction beyond individual voices and entering mainstream development policy discourse in Ghana.
