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Ghanaians will have to stop demonizing businesses that step out of their confines to support political but developmental concerns, medical researcher and epidemiologist, Mrs Susan Adu- Amankwah has warned.

She was worried about the fact that businesses in Ghana were unwilling to support political parties, they were unable to invest resources in things that can engender behavioural change because they do not want to be branded as belonging to one party or another.

“That’s the political reality we are faced with and is that what we want? We cannot live the way we are going. We will not develop,” she lamented.

According to Mrs Adu-Amankwah who is with the Nogouchi Memorial Medical Institute, political parties and political actors have a capacity to do a minimum of good but they cannot transform us if we will not transform ourselves.

Speaking to marketing practitioners at this year’s Strategic Marketing Conference organised by the Chartered Institute of Marketing, Ghana (CIMG) in Accra, Mrs Adu-Amankwah, “businesses and marketers who have the skill for behavioural change must rise up and take it up.”

According to her, just as the marketing profession demands that practitioners identify goals and services and make a pitch so that consumers believe in them and buy them, governments are to do the same.

The theme for the conference was ‘Cause Related Marketing: A panacea for National Behavioural Change.

“Governments must identify goods and services that their people will buy into and ensure that it happens; programmes that governments do must have social validity which is an acceptance of its interventions, procedures, of its outcomes so that people can participate in it fully and we can get the goals that we want to achieve,” she submitted.

Marketers and politicians are not different, she intimated, adding “because they all make promises.”

There is the need to come together to ensure that each other’s skills are place at the disposal of the people so that there can be behavioural change.

“Development can only happen if we change the way we do things; we have done things in particular ways for so long yet we have not reached where we are supposed to reach,” the renowned medical researcher stated.

It is important that businesses partner government institutions such as the NCCE. So for instance a telco would say for any phone call that you make I would donate GH¢1 to NCCE to help run their civic programmes.

National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE)
The NCCE’s mandate is to formulate, implement and oversee programmes intended to inculcate in the citizens of Ghana awareness of their civic responsibilities and appreciation of their rights and obligations as a free people.

We need companies to partner the NCCE, to market them because they have suffered some image denting.

The National Road Safety Commission (NRSC)
“We are dying on our roads and it’s pathetic” she said. She recounted when she used to work in a hospital where “every weekend the nurses and doctors were in manic mood because the facility was on the Kumasi-Nkawkaw -Accra route.”

She wondered why no company could partner the Commission, market it, do course-related marketing such that lives could be saved and behaviours could be changed.