By Eunice Hilda Ampomah / Ruth Armah, GNA
Accra, June 25, GNA – Strategic Communications (Stratcomm) Africa on Monday launched the seventh edition of its Ghana Garden and Flower Show to promote the development of green clean homes, neighbourhood and country.
This year’s edition on the theme: “Be The Change”, would be held from August 28 to September 3, 2019 at the Efua Sutherland Children’s Park in Accra.
It would offer a platform for players in the floriculture and horticulture industry to exhibit their flowers to help generate revenue for the state.
Exhibitors at the show would be rewarded and the overall winner would have an all-expense paid trip to Israel to participate in one of the courses in Agriculture with support from the Israeli Embassy.
Categories for the Awards would include Best Hotel, School, Corporate, Private, Media, Religious, Health Facility, Hospitality and Factory Gardens.
About 40 per cent of the overall mark would be allocated to ‘Attraction and Visual Impact of a Garden’, another 40 per cent would be allocated to ‘Horticulture Excellence’ and 20 per cent would be for the ‘Overall Presentation’.
The Show would also include activities such as Karaoke/Music night, Taste of the Park, Fashion in the Park, Children’s Playground, and Party in the Park.
Ms Esther A. N. Cobbah, the Chief Executive Officer of Stratcomm Africa, said people did not protect the environment because they lacked the needed knowledge to.
The Show, she said, was therefore designed to make citizens appreciate nature and develop positive attitudes towards the environment.
She said the 2018 edition had 135 exhibitors and about 19,000 attendees, saying, she expected more participants this year.
Speaking on the theme, Ms Cobbah said: “Be the change as no one will do it for you. We want to change the filthy environment we live in. Ghana deserves the best and so we want to change the unhealthy and untidy environments we live in.”
“Let us not go to queue for visas to go and see the change when we can also cause it here,” she added.
Ms Cobbah advised the public to desist from littering the environment indiscriminately, especially with plastics, as the death of individuals during flood was as a result of plastics discarded wrongly by citizens to block gutters and drains.
Madam Shani Cooper, the Israeli Ambassador to Ghana, in a keynote address said floriculture and horticulture industry held a great potential for every country and contributed to income generation and economic growth.
She said it was for this reason that the Embassy had initiated the “Israel Green Innovation Award Competition” within the framework of the Ghana Garden and Flower Show Competition to project innovativeness and encourage young people to participate meaningfully in agriculture for job creation and income generation.
The Competition, she explained, was opened to enthusiastic Ghanaians who operated in green innovation between the ages of 20 and 40 with a presentable prototype and not just an idea.
She said judges would assess entries using criteria such as Problem Identification, Product Definition, Innovation, Sustainability, Presentation and other strengths and novelty, and the ultimate winner would get the opportunity to fly to Israel to be trained in a relevant horticulture and floriculture course.
Madam Cooper encouraged the public to develop innovative ideas that promotes green innovation in Ghana, present their idea in a 90-second video and upload it on their Facebook account tagging the @IsraelinGhana and @GhanaGardenandFlowerShow Facebook pages with the hashtags #IsraelGIC and #GGFS2019 and register online to participate in the competition.
CA/DSA
