President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has urged Chief Executive Officers of leading Ghanaian and multinational business operating in the country to help in the realization and implementation of the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

As co-Chair of the Advocates Group of Eminent Personalities on the SDGs, President Akufo-Addo explained that his role is to mobilise political support on the continent, and described the CEOs “as the primary promoters of social and economic transformation”, who are key to the success of the SDGs.

At a breakfast meeting with CEOs on Wednesday, 13th June, 2018, at the Banquet Hall of the Jubilee House, President Akufo-Addo stated, unequivocally, that “I am going to bring you on board the process of making sure that these goals are implemented, and brought to a successful end.”

The President stated that the SDGs must 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”, but rather must “become an active set of goals within the public consciousness, because people can recognise that they do affect all of us.”

As AU Gender Champion, he stated that the goal of gender equity is 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% of our population are women. When we are talking about gender equity, we are talking about what affects all women, young and old,” he said.

He continued, “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.”

With the SDGs presenting 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, the President indicated that the attainment of these goals should be something that matters in their daily lives.

“These are some of the broad goals that I am hoping to realise… 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.