{"id":913034,"date":"2026-06-15T18:13:05","date_gmt":"2026-06-15T23:13:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2026\/06\/15\/africa-must-rethink-gdp-led-development-model\/"},"modified":"2026-06-15T18:13:05","modified_gmt":"2026-06-15T23:13:05","slug":"africa-must-rethink-gdp-led-development-model","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2026\/06\/15\/africa-must-rethink-gdp-led-development-model\/","title":{"rendered":"Africa must rethink GDP-led development model"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The imperative for Africa to reclaim greater control over its economic destiny by shifting away from narrow GDP-led assessments of growth toward frameworks centred on sovereignty, domestic value retention and regional industrial integration dominated discussions at the 2026 Ishmael Yamson and Associates Business Roundtable in Accra.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Held under the theme \u2018The next quarter century: infrastructure, integration and African sovereignty<\/em>\u2019<\/em>, the forum convened policy-makers, corporate leaders and development strategists who argued that Africa\u2019s long-standing dependence on extractive growth models \u2014 increasingly mirrored in the digital economy \u2014 has left the continent generating wealth without sufficiently retaining it, underscoring the need to rethink how growth, trade and investment are structured across the continent.<\/p>\n

A major focus of the discussion was the distinction between gross domestic product (GDP) and gross national product (GNP). While GDP measures the total value of goods and services produced within a country\u2019s borders regardless of ownership, GNP measures the income ultimately earned by a country\u2019s citizens and businesses, including income generated abroad, while excluding profits repatriated by foreign firms.<\/p>\n

Speakers argued that the gap between the two is particularly significant for resource-dependent African economies, where strong GDP growth can coexist with limited domestic wealth creation and weak employment outcomes if profits largely leave the continent.<\/p>\n

Setting the tone for the discussions, Ishmael Yamson Jr., Chief Executive Officer of Ishmael Yamson and Associates, criticised conventional growth metrics for obscuring the extent to which economic activity benefits local economies.<\/p>\n

\u201cGDP is merely a measure of extraction. When a foreign conglomerate extracts a billion from our soil and repatriates the dividends, our GDP rises and we celebrate; but it creates zero employment in our economies,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

He challenged CEOs in the room to pool balance sheets across borders and build Pan-African joint ventures capable of outcompeting legacy global firms, warning that \u201ctreaties do not build supply chains.\u201d<\/p>\n

Finance Minister, Dr. Cassiel Ato Forson, echoed the sentiments in his keynote address, telling delegates that the tragedy of Africa\u2019s economic history is not the absence of resources; it has been the persistent export of value and the import dependency, and warned that the pattern was now repeating itself in digital form.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur raw materials still leave. Increasingly, our data also leaves. Who owns Africa\u2019s digital waves? Who stores Africa\u2019s data? Who finances Africa\u2019s fibre backbone? And who controls Africa\u2019s payment systems?\u201d he quizzed.<\/p>\n

He announced that Ghana was targeting 3,000 megawatts of additional installed generation capacity by 2030, with 30 percent from renewables, and framed energy access as a precondition for industrialisation. \u201cWe cannot industrialise in darkness,\u201d he said, noting that Africa collectively loses an estimated US$25 billion annually to power outages despite being endowed with abundant gas, hydro, solar, wind and critical minerals.<\/p>\n

On trade, he observed that intra-African trade accounts for only 15 percent of Africa\u2019s total trade compared to nearly 70 percent within Europe and approximately 50 percent in Asia; and asked: \u201cCan Africa\u2019s manufacturers scale if markets remain fragmented? Can we build continental champions without harmonising regulation and integrated capital markets?\u201d he noted.<\/p>\n

Dr. Nii Moi Thompson, Chairman of the National Development Planning Commission, delivered the day\u2019s most data-intensive assessment, presenting comparative figures showing that sub-Saharan Africa has regressed on several critical infrastructure indicators over the past 25 years.<\/p>\n

Electricity consumption per capita declined from an average of 452 kilowatt-hours in the previous 25-year period to approximately 431 kilowatt-hours in the most recent, while East Asia recorded growth of over 300 percent over the same timeframe. Manufacturing as a share of GDP fell from 16.2 percent to 10.9 percent across Africa, while Asia\u2019s rose to 28 percent.<\/p>\n

Dr. Thompson attributed a significant share of this regression to the abandonment of long-term planning, documenting four national development plans produced since 2015, the 40-Year Development Plan, Ghana Beyond Aid, Ghana at 100, and Ghana 2057, none of which had been implemented. He noted that Ghana shelved its 40-year plan the same year China launched Made in China 2025.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe brushed it aside over some of the most petty complaints,\u201d he said, adding that a decade was lost to disputes over whether the document should be called a \u2018framework\u2019 rather than a \u2018plan\u2019.\u00a0 He confirmed that President Mahama had directed the NDPC to prepare a consolidated plan anchored in the Directive Principles of State Policy under Chapter 6 of the Constitution, and that MDAs were now being sanctioned for spending budget allocations without reference to approved plans.<\/p>\n

On productivity, Dr. Thompson presented data showing Ghana\u2019s labour productivity at US$11.60 per hour against a world average of US$23, driven almost entirely by mining, financial services and industrial agriculture. He noted that 92 percent of Ghanaian businesses operate in the informal sector, accounting for 80 percent of jobs but only 27 percent of GDP.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe do not have jobless growth. We have growth-less jobs,\u201d he said and announced that the NDPC was developing a three-dimensional growth measurement framework tracking GDP alongside employment creation and wage growth, describing it as a fundamental redefinition of how Ghana measures economic success.<\/p>\n

Augustine Chiew, Chief Technology Officer for Public Services at Huawei, urged African governments to treat digital infrastructure as a core economic competitiveness imperative, arguing that connectivity improvements directly drive GDP per capita growth and that 5G\u2019s low latency capabilities were critical for industrial transformation in sectors such as mining and logistics.<\/p>\n

Drawing on a recent tour across seven countries, he identified a persistent pattern of strong Phase 1 execution on digital projects followed by failure to sustain subsequent phases. \u201cNothing big and worthy to be done gets done in one phase,\u201d he said, contrasting this with China\u2019s model of successive five-year plans in which each cycle builds on the last.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

B&FT
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The imperative for Africa to reclaim greater control over its economic destiny by shifting away from narrow GDP-led assessments of growth toward frameworks centred on sovereignty, domestic value retention and regional industrial integration dominated discussions at the 2026 Ishmael Yamson and Associates Business Roundtable in Accra. Held under the theme \u2018The next quarter century: infrastructure<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":913035,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2084,22605],"tags":[14302,16110],"class_list":["post-913034","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-africa","category-rethink","tag-africa","tag-rethink"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/913034","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=913034"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/913034\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/913035"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=913034"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=913034"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=913034"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}