Ghana deepens reforms to reduce cost of doing business

Ghana has announced further reforms here on Monday to reduce the time and cost of doing business at its ports, enabling importers to pay duties and all other transactional costs through a single electronic payment card system.

"The inefficiencies in doing business are expensive to the economy and increase the cost of goods which is borne by both consumers and producers," Minister for Finance, Seth Terkper stated, while launching the CashXpress card, which is a partnership between continental bank, Ecobank and West Blue, operators of the Ghana National Single Window (GNSW) facility.

He said launching of the CashXpress card complements government's efforts in simplifying and reducing the transactional time and cost of doing business in Ghana.The GNSW introduced by government in September 2015 seems to be paying off already as Ghana has moved up 13 places in the latest World Bank's Trading Across Borders for 2017 profile in its Ease of Doing Business Report.

Ghana moved from 167th place to 154th place in the world and from 37th place to 29th in Sub-Sahara Africa after reducing by 206 hours the documentary compliance time for imports.The electronic payment platform available online operates multi-card Point of Sale (POS) terminals; Mobile Money Collection Services; Online Payment Platform which accepts both mobile money and card payments, among others with traders using a loaded online wallet for all payments and transactional costs on the platform.

"The GNSW CashXpress, an innovative product set to revolutionize the payment of customs duties in Ghana is one of the key components of our overall electronic payment framework," Valentina Mintah, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of West Blue, operators of the GNSW system noted.Mintah added that the efficacy with which the platform facilitates collection across all multiple banks and channels has brought a lot of value for all stakeholders both public and private in terms of reduction in time and cost of transactions and government efficient administration. Enditem