CEO of the Ghana Investment Promotion Centre ,(GIPC), Mr Yofi Grant, has been appointed as an External Independent Member, for a 2-year mandate, on the Board of Directors of the Organisation of African, Caribbean and Pacific States, OACPS’ Endowment and Trust Fund (ETF), to represent the West Africa Region.

The OACPS’ Endowment and Trust Fund (ETF) was formally launched at the 9th Summit of the Heads of State and Government of the OACPS, in Nairobi, Kenya, in December 2019, to assist the OACPS to become financially independent by diversifying its funding sources beyond the assessed contributions of Member States.

A press statement issued by the Embassy of the Ghana, states that, “the appointment was confirmed at the 929th meeting of the Committee of Ambassadors (COA) of the Organisation of African, Caribbean and Pacific States (OACPS) held in Brussels on 23rd June, 2020.”

Meanwhile, Ghana has pledged an amount of One Hundred Thousand Euros (100,000) as her contribution to the fund in response to an appeal launched by the OACPS.

Yofi Grant is also a Ghanaian investment banker with over 30 years of extensive work experience in banking and finance.

He has served in various capacities in corporate finance and advisory, corporate banking and marketing.

He has broad knowledge and great exposure in the African financial markets and has cultivated strong relationships with international private equity funds, portfolio and investment managers and brokerage funds.

The Organisation of African, Caribbean and Pacific States (OACPS), formerly the ACP Group is one of the most enduring institutions in the landscape of international economic diplomacy.

“Today, it is the largest trans-national and tri-continental organisation of developing countries on the international scene. Its seventy-nine (79) member countries from Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific are bound together by a shared sense of history and a common vision of the future, with all of them, save for Cuba, signatories to the Cotonou Partnership Agreement (CPA), also known as the “ACP-EC Partnership Agreement” which connects them to the European Union ,” the statement said.

There are forty-eight (48) countries from Sub-Saharan Africa, sixteen (16) from the Caribbean and fifteen (15) from the Pacific.

Ghana has been an active member of the OACPS since its formation in 1975, with the coming into force of the Georgetown Agreement, signed in Georgetown, The Cooperative Republic of Guyana. Furthermore, the longstanding development cooperation between Ghana and the European Union (EU) has been framed around successive Partnership Agreements (PA) signed by the OACPS and the EU, the first being the Lome Convention of 1975.

The ETF is also one of the key elements of the Future Perspectives of the OACPS, which is geared towards re-inventing and repositioning the OACPS as a ‘fit for purpose’ Organisation and an influential global player on the international scene post-2020, capable of securing the interests of its Member States.