BoG urges exporters to embrace the Letter of Commitment document

Mr Eric Kweku Hammond, a Deputy Director, Foreign Banking Operations of the Bank of Ghana, has advised exporters to embrace the use of the Bank of Ghana’s “Letter of Commitment” (LOC) document to help facilitate their export business.

“The LOC has come to stay because it is a standardized document, and all exporters are supposed to use it to export their merchandise commodities from Ghana.

“No exporter would be able to export without the use of the LOC and therefore every exporter must embrace it,” he said.

Mr Hammond gave the advice during an interview with the Ghana News Agency on the sidelines of a seminar for importers, exporters, bankers and other stakeholders in international trade in Upper West Region, on the Letter of Commitment (LOC) document.

The seminar was to help address challenges posed by the implementation of the LOC for the repatriation of export proceeds to businesses.

He said following the introduction of the LOC for the repatriation of export proceeds in 2016, the Central Bank received several complaints from exporters and some customs house agents on the challenges its implementation was having on their export businesses hence the need to organise the seminar to help educate them on the usefulness of its usage.

He explained that before an exporter exports, some documents had to be processed before the goods are allowed to leave the shores of Ghana and the LOC is one of them.

The LOC, he said, would help the BOG to monitor all exports leaving the shores of Ghana and enable the bank to repatriate the exports’ proceeds into the country.

He said the Bank of Ghana needed foreign exchange from these exports of commodities to help build its reserves and pay for imports as well as develop the infrastructural base of the country.

Mr Hammond said statistics had proven that about 90 per cent of commodities consumed in the country were imported.

“We pay for them from proceeds from the export exchange. If we don’t do something about the repatriation of foreign exchange earnings, we will not be able to build up our reserves to support our local economies and get the needed foreign exchange to embark on our socio-economic development by way of the infrastructure of the country,” he pointed out.

Mr Hammond said the Bank of Ghana aimed to achieve repatriation of export proceeds to enable it to realise its micro economy as a Central Bank.

It is for this reason that the Bank of Ghana was collaborating with the Ghana Shippers Authority to educate importers and exporters on the LOC to enable them to use the document effectively and make the export business easy for all of them.