Africa must ditch its overreliance on commodity exports and develop a “homegrown” model of economic growth centered on regional commerce and domestic demand, Ghana’s president John Atta Mills has urged.

John Atta Mills said that the continent must seize the “opportunity” thrown up by the global economic crisis to adopt a new development formula that centers on the regional private sector, as a catastrophic collapse in exports torpedoes the region’s growth prospects.

“This is the time for us to test our ingenuity and look inwards,” John Atta Mills said. “We need to look at the global economic downturn as an opportunity to find ways to be self-sufficient.” Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Cocoa, Commodities, Economic Community of West African States, ECOWAS, Ghana, Gold, IMF, International Monetary Fund, John Atta Mills, National Democratic Congress, New Patriotic Party, Standard Bank, World Bank