Bio:

Dr Ama Asantewah holds a PhD in Economics, Lectures in the University of Ghana-Legon and has been involved in the Curbing IFFs project that brings together the University of Ghana, government agencies and others in Civil Society Institutes to research and publish on IFFs on Ghana, Laos and other countries. So far Ama and her team have analysed IFFs in Ghana’s Gold, Coca and petroleum.  Ama is also a member of Ghana Technical Working Group that is leading Ghana’s efforts to measure IFFs in commercial and tax from the period 2000 to 2021.

Ama has been involved in a number of IFFs workshops and events including:

•         “Abnormal Pricing in International Commodity Trading: Methodology” GSS/UNCTAD - UNECA Workshop on Measurement of IFFs – Ghana. Accra. 7th – 11th March 2022,

•         “Curbing Commodity Trade-Related Illicit Financial Flows: Policy Options for Ghana” Multi-stakeholder Workshop. Accra, 25th January 2022,  “Abnormal Pricing in International Commodity Trading: Evidence from Ghana”, “UNECA Workshop on IFFs for Ghana, Senegal, and Burkina Faso. Accra, 28^th September 2021 and 21st October 2021, “Commodity Trade-related Illicit Financial Flows (IFFs): Evidence of Abnormal Pricing in Commodity Exports from Ghana”, “Conference on the Study of African Economies, Economic Development in Africa Workshop, Addis Ababa

•         University, 12 – 15 December 2019”, “Curbing Illicit Financial Flows (IFFs) from Resource-rich Developing Countries”, “Plenary Workshop at the Graduate Institute of International and Development

•         Studies in Geneva, Switzerland, 12 – 17 February 2019”.

Ama has co-published a research paper on IFFs: Ahene-Codjoe, A. A., and Alu, A. (2019), Commodity Trade-related Illicit Financial Flows: Evidence of Abnormal Pricing in Commodity Exports from Ghana. Working Paper No. R4D-IFF-WP03-2019.  Work on petroleum is currently undergoing peer review toward publication.

Bio:

Bishop Akolgo holds an MSc. in International Development, and an MSc. in Economics and has just completed his Doctoral studies.  He is the UNCTAD national consultant on IFFs providing technical support to the government of Ghana through the Ghana Statistical Service to measure IFFs in accordance with the SDG 16.4.1.  Before that Bishop designed and implemented the Consortium of Ghana government, UNDP-Ghana, Trust-Africa initiative to measure IFFs in Ghana’s trade with the EU and USA for the period 2000 and 2012 when he was the Executive Director ISODEC.  He has also designed the Ghana IFFs pilot under the UNCTAD/UNECA which has carried out two training programmes so far. 

He has also provided technical assistance to other African Technical Working Groups on IFFs.  Bishop has been involved in ISODEC’s macroeconomic modeling work since 2000 including the design of input-output models for Ghana, SADA area and the Western Region, national Distributional Effects of policies model for Ghana and a multiplier model for Ghana and SADA area.  He has since been working with ActiveViam on Python-based computer models for using the six UNCTAD/UNECA methods for measuring IFFs.  Two of these models (Partner Country and Price Filter) have already been tested with the Ghana Technical Working Group on the measurement of IFFs.  These models will be introduced at this training workshop and used for the training and subsequent work on the estimation of IFFs at the country level using country data.

Link to the profiles of the trainers: https://bit.ly/3YhVKOb