Mr Reginald Yofi Grant appointed external independent member of the Board of Directors of the OACPS Endowment and Trust Fund (ETF)
Brussels, 25th June 2020, Ghana’s Reginald Yofi Grant, currently the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Ghana Investment Promotion Centre (GIPC), has been appointed as an External Independent Member, for a 2-year mandate, on the Board of Directors of the OACPS’ Endowment and Trust Fund (ETF), to represent the West Africa Region. The appointment was confirmed at the 929th meeting of the Committee of Ambassadors (COA) of the Organisation of African, Caribbean and Pacific States (OACPS), formerly the ACP Group, held in Brussels on 23rd June 2020.
The ETF has been established to assist the OACPS to become financially independent by diversifying its funding sources beyond the assessed contributions of Member States. 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. The fund was formally launched at the 9th Summit of the Heads of State and Government of the OACPS, held in Nairobi, Kenya, from 9th to 10th December 2019, which was attended by the President of the Republic of Ghana, H.E. Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo.
Ghana has, meanwhile, 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.
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 Lomé Convention of 1975.
As one of the most enduring institutions in the landscape of international economic diplomacy, the OACPS is today 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. There are forty-eight (48) countries from Sub-Saharan Africa, sixteen (16) from the Caribbean and fifteen (15) from the Pacific.