The volume of contract awarded to Ghanaians in the Petroleum and Gas Industry from January to June this year has hit 221 million dollars.
The figure is an improvement on previous years which was about half under same period of review.
Speaking to Citi Business News, the Minister of Petroleum, Emmanuel Armah Kofi Buah attributed the feat to the passage of the Legislative Instrument (LI) aimed at strengthening the Local Content Law.
“The Petroleum Commission has been tracking Ghanaian participation and the progress for Ghanaians between January this year and June was that, 221 million dollars of contract have gone to Ghanaians because of the local content LI,” he said.
According to him, the LI has also enabled the commission to assess the volume of transactions awarded to indigenous companies in the Tweneboa Enyenre Ntomme(TEN) project .
“We now can track that almost one billion dollars of the contract that went to TEN went to Ghanaians and that is a huge achievement,” he said.
Touching on other areas in the upstream sub-sector that could be improved, Mr. Buah maintained that it is pertinent to strengthen the capacity of Ghanaian companies to help them compete favourably.
Foreign companies dominate petroleum sector
Figures released by the Petroleum Commission earlier this year indicated that the value of activities ceded to indigenous companies in the Petroleum Upstream sector between 2010 and 2015 was only one billion dollars.
In all, total value of activities in the Petroleum Upstream sector between the period was 6.3 billion dollars with foreign companies having access to 5.3 billion dollars of the transactions compared to one billion dollars for local firms.
Currently there are 300 indigenous companies registered with the Petroleum Commission to work in the sector, while only 150 foreign companies do business in Ghana’s Petroleum Upstream Sector.
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By:Lawrence Segebfia/citibusinessnews.com/Ghana