Ayorkor Botchwey Outlines Proposals To Reposition The Commonwealth

The Minister of Foreign Affairs and Regional Integration, Shirley Ayorkor Botchwey, has proposed that the Commonwealth needs to strengthen six key areas of its operational system in order to reposition the bloc.

She said strengthening trade and investment, youth education, skills innovation and start-ups, mobility and labour markets, climate change, and small states and managing resources would ensure an effective Commonwealth institution.

“Based on a community-wide approach to comprehensive action in these areas, we can transform the economies of the countries in the Commonwealth, enable inclusive development and climate resilience, and respond to the expectations of the hundreds of millions across the Commonwealth for the democratic dividend which is consistent with an ambitious vision of the Commonwealth’s values,” she said.

Lecture
Ms Botchwey said this at the Council on Foreign Relations Ghana Fifth Anniversary Lecture Series in Accra last Friday.

It was on the topic: “A Vision for a New Commonwealth in a Fast-Evolving World”.

It was graced by the African Union High Representative for Silencing the Guns, Dr Mohamed Ibn Chambas; a Member of the Council of State, Sam Okudzeto; Ghana’s Ambassador to the US, Hajia Alima Mahama; Ghana’s High Commissioner to the UK, Papa Owusu-Ankomah; the Minister of Lands and Natural Resources, Samuel Abu Jinapor; Ranking Member on Foreign Affairs, Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, and a former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Hackman Owusu-Agyeman.

Nomination
Ms Botchwey has been nominated by the government to contest the position of Secretary-General of the Commonwealth.

A new Secretary-General of the 56-member organisation will be elected on October 22 this year at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Samoa, Scotland, to replace Baroness Patricia Scotland, a dual Dominican-British citizen, whose second and final tenure expires at the end of the year.

Trade and Investment
Throwing light on her proposal, Ms Botchwey said a greater number of citizens in the Commonwealth did not earn enough to power production to create economic security either in the industrialised or developing regions of the Commonwealth.

Across the Commonwealth, she said, policymakers struggled with policies to raise growth in isolation, through austerity and high taxes.

“The pie is simply not capable of feeding everyone unless consumer-based market expansion considers the potential of our 2.5 billion population.

This requires that we re-envision a framework for Commonwealth trade to end the stagnation that is widespread across our countries, surpassing the potential $2 trillion trade within the Commonwealth,” she said.

The Minister of Foreign Affairs said when elected, she would revive the idea of having a free-trade agreement among Commonwealth countries.

Ms Botchwey said young people in the Commonwealth constituted a third of all young people in the world, and that with advances in information and communications technology (ICT), automation and artificial intelligence (AI), and the innovations of social media for distance learning, building the technology and other workers of the 21st Century for a Commonwealth-wide market of high knowledge, intensive innovation and services was an achievable goal in the short term.

“Closing the Commonwealth’s digital gap in health, education and trade; building the digital infrastructure to boost connectivity within and between Commonwealth countries should be the way forward.

“Taking advantage of the best practices and attainments across the Commonwealth, we can design core curriculum and common standards, and facilitate access to borderless financing to ensure that we are the leaders in innovation, start-ups and services in the world,” she said.

Ms Botchwey said labour shortages and other rigidities, as well as the lack of opportunity, drove unsafe, disorderly and unregulated migration that bedevilled policy and public sentiment in the richer parts of the Commonwealth.

A Commonwealth-wide mobility compact, she said, could help address labour and skills demand through safe, orderly and regulated migration, while maintaining the ability to teach or train young people wherever they lived in the Commonwealth.

Climate Change
“We have witnessed the dramatic effects of climate change and natural disasters sweeping our blue Islands, as well as flooding, drought, change in distribution of rainfall, drying up of rivers, abnormal sea-walling, locust invasion and energy production and consumption in poor member countries.

“We must mobilise to adapt to climate change and to withstand its impacts and those of the natural disasters, which bring devastation to our continents.

We need to build greater resilience and achieve sustainability, enabling us to reduce the risk of present and future shocks, and accelerate progress towards fulfilment of the Sustainable Development Goals,” she said.

Ms Botchwey said it was impossible to look at a future-looking Commonwealth without a robust Commonwealth strategy on climate adaptation.

She said the Commonwealth should continue to put a special lens on small states and aim to build resilience and promote inclusive development in those vulnerable economies.

She said an accountable, effectively run Commonwealth Secretariat was essential to realise the ambitious goal of a new Commonwealth.

“We are in this together. If we are to meet the ambitions of the citizens of the Commonwealth, it is clear that we need a development cooperation framework that works for all the Commonwealth as a community,” Ms Botchwey said.

The President of CFR-Ghana, D.K. Osei, who chaired the event, expressed the hope that the lecture had contributed to making the points easier for the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Samoa in October.

Credit :graphic.com.gh