Ghana is blessed with a wealth of aquatic resources. These include ports that are situated near crucial international shipping lanes, inland waterways, hydrocarbon reserves, and fisheries. These provide the nation a variety of chances to guarantee food security, close income gaps, draw in foreign direct investment, boost domestic production, and improve trading conditions.

This emphasizes the need to appropriately manage and protect them.

In Ghana, 7.5 million people reside in coastal regions, while another 2 million do so roughly 50 kilometers inland. Ghana, like many other coastal nations in Africa, heavily depends on its blue economy for food, jobs, and income. Since commercial operations started in 2010, the oil and gas industry has brought in over $4 billion. Additionally, the fishing industry in Ghana employs roughly 10% of the labor force and contributes 4.5% of the nation’s GDP.

Additionally, Ghana’s ports in Tema and Takoradi handle 70% of the country’s maritime traffic. The largest container port in Ghana and West Africa is the Port of Tema.

But what are known as “blue crimes” pose a serious threat to Ghana’s coastal regions as well. These include illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing as well as ocean dumping, piracy, stowing away, drug and human trafficking, smuggling of armaments, and blue cyberthreats. In Ghana and other nations bordering the Gulf of Guinea, piracy has assumed a prominent role. The trade, government revenue, and prospective blue economy developments are all significantly impacted by the other crimes as well.

Ghana undoubtedly cannot afford the effects of disregarding its maritime domain. For this reason, a thorough National Integrated Maritime Strategy has been devised.

We analyze the tactic in a recently published study. Without sufficient political will from the highest levels of government and without the requisite resources (financial, human resource, equipment, and technology) to support strategy and action plans, it is doomed to failure.

The strategy’s goal is for Ghana’s marine area to be secure and safe by 2040, with a thriving blue economy that benefits every Ghanaian. It offers a comprehensive strategy for realizing this vision.

The statement contains six strategic goals with a focus on capacity building, cooperation, marine environmental conservation, safety, and security. It also offers a structure for sustainability and implementation. This contains requests for the distribution of funds from the federal budget.

The Policy

The strategy’s goal is for Ghana’s marine area to be secure and safe by 2040, with a thriving blue economy that benefits every Ghanaian. It offers a comprehensive strategy for realizing this vision.

The statement contains six strategic goals with a focus on capacity building, cooperation, marine environmental conservation, safety, and security. It also offers a structure for sustainability and implementation. This contains requests for the distribution of funds from the federal budget.

The Security Governance Initiative’s work is where the strategy first emerged. The US and five partner African countries signed this international security effort in 2016. Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, and Tunisia are among them. Its goal is to make it easier for people to get knowledge on matters of national security so they can help with important reforms in some industries.

The initial emphasis was on transnational blue crimes that transcend marine, border, and cyberspace as well as challenges to maritime security. This, however, changed after the International Tribunal of the Law of the Sea resolved Ghana’s maritime border dispute with Cote d’Ivoire in 2017. Ghana was able to keep control of its rich offshore oil assets thanks to the deal.

The current policy needed to be replaced with one that was more comprehensive because Ghana’s maritime area has grown to be larger than its land area. The National Integrated Maritime Strategy was created as a result.

What’s driving the policy?

The strategy’s original impetuses were the growth of the blue economy and marine security. However, some stakeholders at the implementation workshop felt that it appeared to be a marine security plan that tried to include other blue economy sectors.

When the initial draft was evaluated by stakeholders, this led to contentious discussions concerning the order of tasks in breakout teams. The degree to which development-related stakeholders were initially involved is at the core of this. Stakeholder representation is essential, especially when national marine statistics are unavailable or infrequently used.

Some stakeholders in Ghana also contend that the maritime strategy’s primary motivator should be economic rather than security-related. This is due to the fact that security and safety are interrelated in the marine environment. They add that economic issues including fishing, tourism, port growth, coastal erosion, and flooding brought on by climate change have a direct impact on livelihoods. Therefore, according to the stakeholders, development ought to have been the strategy’s primary goal and motivator from the start. Threat evaluations connected to the economic concerns might then be used to design security solutions.

Tools towards security

Ghana is a maritime country that is relatively new. The ocean has historically been utilized for fishing, however there are now many uses for the marine environment. Thus, an integrated approach is essential for the growth, security, and safety of the blue economy.

It is a crucial tenet of the Yaounde Code of Conduct Architecture in the context of the region. In order to help the region confront a variety of maritime crimes that impact it, this was signed in 2013 by 25 countries in West and Central Africa.

Other African nations will be able to learn from Ghana’s progress with this policy. For instance, South Africa is addressing its own interests in marine security. Particularly significant is the way the steps Ghana took helped to progress and guide the South African endeavor.

The collaborative approach Ghana used and positioning the integrated plan at a top political office serve as helpful examples for South Africa because each the process and the final strategy contain their own intrinsic values for success.

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