President of the Republic of Ghana, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, has re-echoed his government’s efforts to eradicate poverty from Ghana.
Speaking at the 74th session of the UN General Assembly, Akufo-Addo indicated that poverty is a daily reality that Ghanaians live and feel “for far too many of our people are burdened with it, and it robs us of the dignity that should be the inherent right of every human being”.
He said, “if the world wants to marshal all its undoubted energies to support this fight, there cannot be a better start than an acknowledgement and a consensus among the nations of the world that, indeed, poverty anywhere degrades us all, whether in the developed or developing world”.
The President noted that the advance in technology has made eradicating poverty easier than it used to be.
“A mere twenty years ago, mobile phones were a rarity that some feared would become a developed world status symbol and another sign of the technology gap between the rich and the poor. Today, the poorest person in the most inaccessible place in the poorest country has a mobile phone, often a smartphone,” he said.
The president reiterated that technology has transformed our lives because “today there are more than forty-one million subscriptions. This has led to a remarkable difference in communications within our country and with the outside world. A sizeable and growing number of the population has been and is being brought into the formal banking sector by the mobile phone”.
He added that the application of technology can be the tool to set countries on the road to prosperity.
The modernisation of agriculture through the application of technology, Nana Addo said, could well turn out to be the fastest way to make the turnaround that countries seek.
He indicated that, “young people of the world, especially the youth of Ghana and Africa, have demonstrated their ingenuity and innovative prowess, and we need to enlist them fully in the fight. It will be an easier battle, of course, if trade practices were seen to be more equitable and fairer. The question always remains whether the rich nations are prepared for an equitable and fair-trading order. It appears that they are not, and we have, thus, to continue to fight for a fairer world economic order”.
Source: www.ghanaweb.com
