One District, One Factory (1D1F) - Activating a Success Model

• Published date: 18 February 2019
• Publication title: Business and Financial Times

'There is no easy fix for youth unemployment. Partnership between the public and private sectors can make a big difference' - Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.

One of the policies this government established that resonated so well with the Ghanaian populace is 'One District, One Factory' (1D1F) - it's just that I am not sure if all stakeholders understood clearly how this policy was going to be successfully implemented. Although the implementation has not gone that well in my opinion, it is still one of the critical policies that will change the landscape of business for this economy, and all must be done to make it succeed. In this article I try to compare the policy with Dr. Nkrumah's policy of setting up factories across the length and breadth of this country to exploit natural resources. There is no doubt that the successful implementation of this policy will go a long way to reduce the high unemployment rate and give a boost to the economy.

Dr. Nkrumah's Model of State-owned Enterprises

Speaking to Mr. Kwame Jantuah, CEO of African Energy Consortium and a staunch Nkrumaist, recently on the motive behind Dr. Kwame Nkrumah's objective of setting up the State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs), I could only arrive at the conclusion that it is not very different from the 1D1F policy. The only difference is that the former established the policy to be fully run by the state whilst the latter seems to be falling on the shoulders of the private sector.

Dr. Nkrumah strategically established factories close to the source of raw materials and sought to cart the goods to the urban centers via rail and other means of transportation. The Pwalugu tomato canning factory was set up 'amid' tomato farms; the Zuarungu meat processing factory was set up because of the large herds of cattle and livestock available in the Northern Region; Bolgatanga rice mills in the Upper East Region; the Komenda Sugar factory established because of the abundance of sugarcane in that area etc.

Several reasons have been attributed to the collapse of these factories, including inadequate funding and bad policies. It makes business-sense to revisit the blueprint of these established but collapsed factories and just review the funding and governance structure for all of them to be revived. I will explain that a bit more in detail in the paragraphs below.

One District, One Factory policy

The One District, One Factory initiative, according to President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, is a policy set to ignite Ghana's...