Akufo-Addo urges businesses to work for success of SDG’s
President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has rallied Chief Executive Officers (CEO’s) of leading Ghanaian and multinational businesses operating in the country to give strong backing to efforts at attaining the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
He reminded them that as primary promoters of social and economic transformation, they were the key to the success of the SDG’s.
He was therefore eager to bring them on board “the process of making sure that these goals are implemented, and brought to a successful end”.
President Akufo-Addo was speaking at a meeting with the CEO’s at the Jubilee House, in Accra.
His role as a co-Chair of the Advocates Group of Eminent Personalities on the SDGs was to mobilize political support on the continent for the realization of the SDG’s.
These goals, he stated, should not remain within the public consciousness as “some abstract remote phenomenon that is debated amongst a few political leaders and bureaucrats in the floors of the General Assembly of the United Nations.”
They should rather “become an active set of goals within the public consciousness, because people can recognise that they do affect all of us”.
The meeting was to solicit ideas from the CEO’s how to help government and the private sector in mobilizing expertise and best practices to achieve sustainable development.
The President said gender equity was one of the goals of the SDGs that should have moved from the area of rhetoric into reality.
“That statement is a statement that affects more than majority of people in Ghana.
We know that 52 percent of our population are women. When we are talking about gender equity, we are talking about what affects all women, young and old.
We are talking about access to education. We know the importance of education in our country.
We have made a huge commitment to ensuring that every Ghanaian child is able to go to school, at least within the present context to secondary school level, and it is an extremely important tool for the future development of our country.”
President Akufo-Addo indicated that the attainment of the SDG’s “should be something that matters in everyday life, as these goals presented the world with a unique opportunity to fight inequality on all fronts, wipe out extreme poverty, tackle the issues of climate change, and reverse the degradation and unsustainable use of our environmental resources”.
“These are some of the broad goals that I am hoping to realize. We have a relatively short period to be together, but I am hoping that, in this relatively short period, and, in subsequent engagements that we are going to have, we would be able to address these goals of this meeting that we have set up,” he added.
The Special Advisor to the President on the SDG’s, Dr. Eugene Owusu, said government was focused on collaborating with strategic partners like the private sector to make Ghana one of Africa’s biggest sustainable nations.
Source: GNA