The Association of Ghana Industries (AGI) is spearheading the establishment of an Industrial Bank in the country.

The main focus of the bank is to offer long term support to industry in order to make them competitive.

The National Vice President of the AGI, Mr. Samuel Appenteng made this revelation at the Business Development Workshop and the 9th Annual General Meeting of the Western and Central Regional branch of the AGI at Takoradi.

The theme for the function was “Identifying Opportunities, Processes and Removal of bottlenecks and challenges of outsourcing to local Ghanaian SMEs: the case of the Oil and Gas Industry in Ghana”.

Mr. Appenteng said establishing the bank was in its preparatory stage and a committee had been formed to work out the modalities.

He noted that presently, the banks offer short term support to industry at high interest rate and this was making industry uncompetitive adding “Many companies cannot survive as a result of this”.

Mr. Alfred Ekow Gyan, the Deputy Western Regional Minister urged the AGI to organize continuous professional training for its members to enable them transact business with the country’s oil and gas industry.

He said the Association should also assist its members to partner with overseas companies to improve upon their capacity to embark on quality and large- scale production at a faster and cheaper cost.

According to him, SMEs could challenge themselves by strengthening their capacities through mergers, taking advantage of the economies of scale, introducing innovation into production, high caliber personnel, introducing best practices in ethics, improving negotiation skills and reducing the cost of production.

He added that government would create the enabling environment for businesses to thrive as a way of creating jobs and raising government revenue.