The founder and CEO of COA Research and Manufacturing Company Limited, Professor Samuel Ato Duncan has been sworn in as the President of the Ghana Federation of Traditional Medicine Practitioners Associations, GHAFTRAM.

The swearing-in Ceremony which came off on Tuesday, November 22^nd, 2022 at the Ministry of Health Conference Hall brought together the leadership of the various traditional medicine practitioners associations and stakeholders from all over the country.

In all, 22 elected national executives were sworn in by Justice Yonny Kulendi, a justice of the Supreme Court of Ghana. They were made up of 18 national officers and four elected patrons.

Delivering his acceptance speech, Professor Duncan said Ghana has traditional medicines that could take care of cancers, kidney diseases, viral infections, and many other diseases, with minimal side effects.

He said if the country was able to develop and package those medications to global standards, it would have a lot of medicines that could support the health of the people and also for export to bring in foreign exchange.

“The traditional medicine sector presents a unique opportunity for the attainment of quality healthcare delivery, reduce the unemployment burden, create wealth, as well as stimulate socio-economic activities within the value chain,” he said.

Prof. Duncan, who is also the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of COA Research and Manufacturing Company Limited, said Ghana could rake in billions of dollars from traditional medicines, adding that a lot of progress had been made in the production of traditional medicines in Ghana.

“Traditional medicine was once termed as ‘primitive’, but that designation is gradually becoming a thing of the past. Now many practitioners adopt scientific processes in their production.

“We hope to partner with various countries and institutions that have made significant progress in the manufacture and administration of traditional medicines. We know China and India are far advanced in this direction,” he said.

Prof. Duncan announced that the Federation would engage with relevant stakeholders to develop a system whereby practitioners who did not have formal education would be given the opportunity in the local languages they understood and subsequently issued with standard certificates.

Touching on the economic challenges in the country, he said if gold, cocoa, and oil had all failed in turning around the economic fortunes of the nation, then the country must look to “the green gold agenda GHAFTRAM wants to pursue”.

“In the coming days, together with my executives, we shall engage the various stakeholders in the areas of medicine, science, technology, research, and entrepreneurship to brainstorm and map out a plan of action towards the implementation of the green gold revolution,” he said.

The Director for Traditional and Alternative Medicine at the Ministry of Health, Dr. Anastasia Yirenkyi, said if the country wanted to achieve the Ghana Beyond Aid agenda, then a major focus must be on traditional medicines.

She charged traditional medicine practitioners to ensure that the country was able to rub shoulders with developed countries in terms of the production of quality, standardized, and efficacious herbal medicines.

The President of the Ghana Journalists Association (GJA), Albert Kwabena Dwumfour, congratulated the new executives and urged them to stick to their vision.

He also urged them to ensure that all their members followed rules and also worked hard to dispel the myths around traditional medicines in the country.

GHAFTRAM is an umbrella body of individual medicine practitioners associations in Ghana. It has a membership of about four thousand.