The Upper West Centre for National Culture has organized a maiden edition of an entrepreneurship and culture seminar to highlight the potential of the region's cultural heritage for its development.
The event, held over the weekend, saw young people of diverse backgrounds congregate to learn how culture and innovation could be harnessed for jobs creation and economic development amidst enthralling poetry performances by poets Negus and Pobee Mwintombo.
The Upper West Regional Public Relations Officer and Nadowli-Kaleo District Director of the Centre for National Culture (CNC), Mr Mulumba Songsore said the critical role culture plays in all facets of the human society requires that young people learn to appreciate and value the cultural heritage of the region, hence the seminar.
He noted that there was an array of cultures all over the world and that for one to be able to assimilate other cultures, there was the need to first understand better one's culture.
"Currently, looking at the interconnected nature of the world, globalization dawns on us, and we are faced with an array of different cultural values.
"It is important that we prioritize our own, know our culture so we can be able to assimilate well with other cultures," he explained.
He said there was a rich tapestry of cultural potential in the Upper West Region which was not utilized and that young people must be gotten to appreciate it.
"When you appreciate what you have, you learn to value it, and when you are finding value in it, you can even monetize it for your own benefit," Mr Songsore said.
Mr Lwanga Songsore, a Pan-African scholar who led the seminar, said the development of the Upper West Region was dependent on the willing of people to support indigenous industrial products.
"If the region is going to go forward, then we have to care about having our lives depend on the traditional industrial products like the shea butter, like the local chicken, like the local rice, and all the different things that people produce within the region," he said.
He, however, bemoaned the increasingly high taste of people for foreign goods at the expense of local variants as detrimental to the development of indigenous businesses.
He said people should consciously support local industries by patronizing their products using the expenditure model, "who originates the product and who benefits from purchasing the product."
Mr Songsore added that the traditional principles of reciprocity and mutual aid where people worked on each other's farms in turns could be redeployed in present circumstances to support each other's businesses.
Mr Sumaila Chakurah, the Chief Executive Officer of Noni Hub, a tech innovation lab in Upper West, said the seminar was a good starting point to reevaluating and adding value to the culture and its elements.
"I think this is a very good starting point for us to rethink how we view culture and also look at which aspects of the culture we can actually preserve, which aspects of the culture we can also look at to add value and then make something out of it," he said.
He indicated that some aspects of the culture, citing pottery as example, were fading due to limited innovation.
He called for innovation in cultural artifacts and a change of mindset towards the culture of region in order to eke out the potentials of the culture.
He said it was high time people began to appreciate and value the cultural products of the region saying, "when you are passing by and you see a single piece of a shea nut on the ground, you know that you are passing by a GH¢20; when you are cutting down a shea tree, you know that you are cutting down a one-million-dollar investment."
The entrepreneurship and culture seminar was held under the theme, "Reliving the Upper West Region's Place in the World: New Opportunities and Ways Forward" and was supported by Necessary Aid Alliance, GhanaThink Foundation, and Inspired Legacy.