Accra: The UNIDO Africa Investor survey will be conducted in Ghana from April to June 2010. The survey, which would be launched officially in the country on Friday, April 9, 2010, is being conducted with technical support from Microsoft Corporation.
The reports of the survey are expected to provide evidence in the form of indicators and indexes, which would allow the measurement of the impact of different categories of foreign investors on the domestic economy, particularly their interaction with domestic investors. It would also assess the impact of changes in the investment climate and government interventions on the performance and investment decisions of the same investors.
The survey project has been designed in response to assessments conducted over a seven-year period since the inception of UNIDO's African Investment Promotion. The Agency Network (AfrIPANet) comprises 22 African investment promotion agencies.
It would essentially seek to find detailed, comprehensive and empirically sound answers to several questions. The survey is designed to provide a means for participating countries to assess their own needs for improving their investment climate and to design the required interventions.
The survey would help to empower investment promotion agencies in areas such as designing and to formulate evidence-based investment promotion strategies to target investors and leverage their impact on local development.
It would promote consensus building and a shared vision among the investment promotion stakeholders as well as strengthen the policy advocacy role through the empirical survey.
The project would also support Private Sector Associations and other intermediary organizations to identify forms of investment with positive impact on the economy, formulate policies to effect changes in the regulatory and strengthen mutually beneficial linkages between foreign investors and the domestic sector through the SPX networks and other support programmes offered through the UNIDO Investment and Technology Promotion Offices (ITPOs).
The UNIDO Subcontracting and Partnership Exchange (SPX) Centre would also be set up at the Association of Ghana Industries (AGI) to provide information and advisory services to small and medium scale industries in Ghana.
SPX is a technical cooperation programme that links domestic enterprises in developing countries to supply chains of large domestic or international companies.
The aim of the UNIDO SPX Programme is to develop the capacities of local small and medium-scale enterprises (SMEs) to meet the needs of customers and to identify profitable business and investment opportunities for them.
