Welcome Statement By Hon. Oboshie Sai Cofie, Minister Of Tourism And Diasporan Relations On The Occasion Of The Opening Ceremony Of UNWTO Regional Seminar And Workshop On Tourism And Handcrafts.

Mr. Chairman,

Mr. Ousmane Ndiaye, UNWTO Regional Representative for Africa,

Distinguished Resource Persons brought from around the world,

Excellencies,

Distinguished Delegates,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

On behalf of the government and people of Ghana I welcome you all to our regional seminar and workshop themed “Tourism and Handcrafts”: Two key Economic Sectors to Contribute to Poverty Reduction in Africa”, which is being organised jointly by UNWTO and the Ministry of Tourism and Diasporan Relations.

I am pleased to welcome especially our Africa regional representative at the UNWTO, Mr Ousmane Ndiaye, and other distinguished representatives from UNWTO and speakers from various countries.

I welcome warmly distinguished delegates from all over Africa. I am sure most of you have visited our beautiful and peaceful country before and have sampled our legendary Ghanaian hospitality. However, for those who are visiting for the first time, I invite you to stay a day or two longer to enjoy more of our scenery and hospitality.

As part of your programme, we have put together some facility-visits and tours to selected locations in Ghana; among them will be an Accra City tour, tour of some craft villages in the Eastern Region of Ghana, visit to the Cocoa Research Institute in Tafo, and a tour of the original cocoa farm named after Tetteh Quarshie, who first brought cocoa into this country.

Ladies and Gentlemen, this seminar and workshop is a follow-up on the out come of the regional conference on Tourism and Handicraft which was organised by UNWTO in November 2006 in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.

Participants at the said seminar agreed that further development of the synergy between handcraft and tourism be pursued as it has the potential to bring major socio-economic benefits to Africa, binding communities together, fostering the continuity of local traditions and contributing towards the reduction of poverty.

I take this opportunity to express government’s appreciation to the UNWTO for choosing Ghana to host this seminar. We are grateful because it is an opportunity for Ghanaian policy makers, producers and sellers of handicrafts to learn from other countries what they also do.

The aim of this Accra seminar and workshop is to continue to examine the partnership between tourism and handcrafts, within the broad framework of achieving the Millennium Development Goals.

We in Ghana believe that tourism can significantly contribute to the attainment of the goals. That is why this government is actively promoting tourism-related programmes that involve poor communities and which encourage projects that will facilitate income generation and will assure poverty reduction.

Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen, as a woman, and a gender activist myself, I believe strongly that tourism-and-handcraft-related employment for our rural womenfolk would empower them enough to actively partake in the development process of our individual countries.

This is why the Government of Ghana has been committed to ensure that the synergy between the tourism and handcraft sectors is fully realised. The greatest attractions in Ghana’s tourism are our history and culture; and these are also expressed in various forms including arts and crafts. Government acknowledges this and has been promoting hard for the tourism industry and the handicraft sub-sector to work closely together to take advantage of one another. We believe that there should be a conscientious effort by both sectors to influence the policies of the other, and that the potential of the sectors supporting each other to grow be fully tapped; and this has been the exact thinking direction of the government of Ghana.

Mr Chairman, foreign exchange earnings from handicrafts, as a non-traditional export from Ghana have increased over the years and we all know that tourism has played a major part in this area. Tourists are the highest exporters of handicrafts and government plans to capture their expenditure on handicraft in the export account of this country. I therefore use this opportunity to call on the agencies that oversee the two sectors to collaborate and coordinate in their policy and programme formulations so that we can make progress on the right path we have taken.

Excellencies, Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen, UNWTO Statistics over the past decades have again shown that Africa, in spite of its enormous tourism potential continues to receive disproportionately low tourism receipts. One way of increasing our receipts is through the production of quality and yet authentically designed handcrafts.

We as Africans have extremely rich cultures and traditions that command international interests and curiosities. I want to believe that if we are to vividly portray these in our crafts, albeit quality-produced and well packaged, we can take advantage of the number of tourists’ inflow and increase the patronage of the handicraft trade.

Here, I again would like to call on all producers and makers of handicrafts to pay special attention to finishing details of their wares. The themes and creativity employed in our handicrafts could further be enhanced if we strive hard to demonstrate meticulous attention to finishing detail on our sculptures, carvings, paintings and other hand-made items. We must also work on the improvement of our packaging and marketing. We should understand that we are competing with other regions in the world, such as Asia, Eastern Europe, Arabia and the rest, whose wares also attract a lot of curiosity and hence high patronage.

Fortunately Mr Chairman, l am very pleased to note that we have in this room knowledgeable persons to examine means of using tourism as the lead economic activity to promote the handicraft industry in our region.

Handicraft has been part of our culture and I believe we can develop this industry to improve the lives of our people.

Mr Chairman, I am extremely excited about the prospects this seminar and workshop holds for these two interrelated sectors. I believe that in your deliberations, participants would strive to create the necessary policy environment and areas of interoperability and synergies that would ensure a sustained contribution to poverty reduction in Africa by these sectors.

Once again, I welcome you to this very important seminar and workshop and wish all of us a successful meeting.

AKWAABA!

Thank you.

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