President Nana Akufo-Addo has launched the Ghana Beyond Aid charter at this year’s May Day celebration in Accra.

He told the several thousands of workers who converged on the Independence Square for the Workers’ Day parade that: “Ghana Beyond Aid is setting our nation on an irreversible pathway of development”.

“With the blessing of the Almighty and our collective effort, we will march boldly from poverty to prosperity so that we can create the Ghana our forefathers envisaged”, President Akufo-Addo said on 1 May 2019.

He said “on behalf of the people of Ghana, I wish to thank the Ghana Beyond Aid Committee for the good work done,” as he brandished the charter.

On the assumption of office on 7 January 2017, the president espoused his government’s desire to prudently manage the country’s natural resources in a manner that will allow the country’s development agenda to be financed without recourse to external assistance – an agenda the president referred to as building a ‘Ghana beyond aid’.

Delivering his address at the 61st Independence Day Celebration at the Black Star Square, on Tuesday, 6 March 2018, Nana Akufo-Addo said the realisation of his vision of a Ghana beyond aid “requires a deliberate, qualitative change in all aspects of our lives; especially, in the structure of our economy, the nature of our infrastructure, the education of our young people and acquisition of skills, and, above all, in our attitudes and holding firm to the values that define us.”

He noted that: “Even if there were no aid fatigue, and with the best will in the world and the most charitable governments in place in the so-called donor countries, there will never be enough aid to develop Ghana to the level we want. Aid was never meant to be what would bring us to the status of a developed nation.”