Mr. Horace Nii Ayi Ankrah, Ghana's Deputy Head of Mission to China, has urged both Chinese and Ghanaian city authorities engaged in sister-city negotiations to take such collaborations seriously.

The collaborations, he said, would bring mutual benefits to the countries as it offered development and growth.

"City governments should take such programmes with the seriousness they deserve, but not to see them as accolades and opportunities to do otherwise."

Mr. Ankrah, who spoke to the Ghana News Agency on phone from China, after his three-day working visit to Xuzhou in the Jiangsu Province, said he had finalised the preliminary stages of the sister-city collaboration between the city of Xuzhou and Kumasi.

He said apart from easy movement of citizens; such collaborations also offered scientific, economic, recreational, educational and cultural opportunities with the single purpose of enhancing and changing lives.

Mr Ankrah said the China University of Mining and Technology would also collaborate with the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) as part of the sister-city relations between Xuzhou and Kumasi.

He said Professor Guoqing Zhou, the Vice President of China University for Mining and Technology, had agreed to offer KNUST six postgraduate scholarships annually at his request when all negotiations were finalised.