Accra, June 1, GNA - A Budget Expert on Friday hinted that enormous business opportunities existed in the 2007 budget statement and urged the private sector to source them to increase their profitability. Mr Tawia Akyea, Executive Director of Foreign Trade Institute (FTI) who made the disclosure at a workshop on business opportunities in the 2007 budget and economic policy statement in Accra said businesses now needed to adopt aggressive strategies to access the opportunities.

The workshop, which was organized by the Private Enterprise Foundation (PEF) and funded by the United Nation Development Programme (UNDP), sought to examine the opportunities in the budget statement and challenge businesses to explore those avenues.

Mr Akyea enumerated some of the areas that could be explored by enterprises in the Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDA's), saying in the agricultural sector for instance an estimated one trillion cedis would be spent on personal emoluments, services, administration and investment among other areas.

He noted that an area such as sanitation had a huge allocation that could be explored by serious business minded persons and that would bring big returns to them but so far the opportunity had not been spotted by any one.

Mr Akyea stated that about 2,783,799 billion cedis had been allocated in the road and transport sector, which would be spent on items such as services, security and investment drives. He said in the energy sector which was a key area and selected as a prime mover in the economy, an amount of 936,293 billion had been allocated which would be disbursed among the VRA, ECG, TOR and the Energy commission.

Mr stressed that these areas provided huge revenue outlets for the private sector and while others took advantage of them to enrich their business portfolio, majority of the people were unaware. Dr Osei Boeh-Ocansey, Director General, PEF noted that government was the single largest customer group in the country and that its market was too big to be ignored by any business firm.

"Government market offers a wide range of business opportunity to the private sector, these opportunities come in the form of contracts for the supply and delivery of goods and services", he added. He noted that though businesses had taken advantage of some of the opportunities, there was still the need to critically identify and isolate systematic ways by which expenditure and budget allocations translated into business opportunities. 1 June 07