The Deputy Minister for Energy and MP for Karaga, Hon. Dr. Amin Adam has said that energy access must be a priority if Africa is to develop.
He said this during a panel discussion on the second day of the maiden African Energy Week (AEW) currently taking place in Cape Town, South Africa.
Speaking on developing the African petroleum market’s value chain, Dr. Amin re-iterated Ghana’s agenda to develop her petroleum market by progressively building a robust local content system, improving innovation by building new infrastructure and replacing old and aged ones.
He also underscored the need for human resource building to be scrutinised carefully, noting that in the past years, human resource capital has been developed but has not been discipline-specific, thus limiting locals when they are faced with other tasks in the oil and gas chain.
He also underscored the relevance of funding on the conversation of infrastructure building. “African countries must capitalise on internally generating the funds for their infrastructure, rather than constantly depending on developed nations who mostly do not consider their local content interest”, Dr. Amin said.
He further disclosed that Ghanaian engineers were able to take over the operation of the national gas processing plant after the Chinese engineers left following its establishment, saving the nation over 3 million dollars a month.
“To build a discipline-specific human resource capacity, we have instituted the Accelerated Oil and Gas Capacity (AOGC) building programme to train our young men and women in artisans that would be required on the various FPSOs and the technical upstream sector in general”, he added.
Dr. Adam suggested that local content agreements should not only include international oil companies (IOC) training the locals in the host country, but IOCs repatriating these local trainees to their mother counties to give them more exposure.
Dr. Amin also re-emphasised the need for African countries to strive to achieve universal access to electricity and disclosed that Ghana currently stands at 86% accessibility. “We are very committed to ensure every crevice in Ghana experience electricity and I think this should be a very good example for our sister countries who are striving to reach the top of the percentile ladder”, Dr. Adam said.
The maiden four-day conference, organised by the African Energy Chamber, brings together energy players in Africa for networking, exhibitions, panel discussions and one-on-one meetings on issues pertaining to the sector across the continent.
