Accra, Aug. 2, GNA – The Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) has encouraged Ghana to adopt Kaizen for national development and implore a strong commitment from higher-level officials, organisations and individuals to achieve that.
JICA seeks further collaboration with Government to adopt Kaizen in initiatives such as the Nation Builders Corps, the One District One Factory, the Free Senior High School Initiative and the Planting for Food and Jobs programme.
According to JICA, Kaizen included; educational curricula across all levels and could provide cost efficient methods and easier application to existing systems in all sectors.
JICA disclosed this in a statement it copied to the Ghana News Agency explaining that Kaizen was a working methodology of improvement of quality and productivity widely applied in Japanese enterprises especially for manufacturing industries.
Kaizen, the statement said, was core to what propelled the Japanese automobile Toyota from a smaller company to a current global competitive well-known company.
It said JICA in relating to Kaizen adoption in Ghana under industry and private sector engagement section, and implemented the project for formulating a Strategic Model for Quality/Productivity Improvement through strengthening BDS for MSMEs (2015-2018).
Both projects, the statement said, were implemented with the National Board for Small Scale Industries as its counterpart who received Kaizen training under the technical cooperation projects to strengthen their Business Development Services and enhance the productivity of micro, small and medium scale enterprises in the country.
“The results from the projects have influenced the growth of businesses immensely. So far, Kaizen has been implemented in more than 254 Ghanaian companies and benefits include; improved productivity averagely by 37 per cent, increase in sales by 53 per cent, and reduction of defect rates by 45 per cent amongst others,” it said.
Fifty-one Business Advisors, the statement noted, were equipped with Kaizen methods to support Ghanaian businesses in five regions in the country.
Aside the Industry sector, Kaizen also made an impact in the health industry and some multiplying effects in both sectors include; increased productivity and quality resulting in profitability, healthy and safe work environments preventing infections in factories and hospitals, and improved management support and supervision, the statement said.
Others were; re-defining workers attitude due to bottom up approach of Kaizen, service and administrative improvement in hospitals such as reduction of patient waiting time, incidence of re-infections, rejected laboratory samples, and expired medicine.
The statement disclosed that, due to the positive impacts of Kaizen in earlier projects, JICA was working towards the formulation of a next project comprising an enterprise support project based on Kaizen dissemination.
In relation to the seventh Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD VII) to be held in August 2019, the statement said, Kaizen would be exhibited as a side event topic for discussion.
JICA is the Japanese government agency for implementing official development assistance and has been instrumentally promoting the concept of Kaizen in its technical cooperation since 2012.
JICA started operations in Ghana as early as 1963 and has since been cooperating in Ghana’s development widely in infrastructure (like roads and bridges, electricity and fishery ports), agriculture (mainly rice sub-sector), industry (SMEs), health (Universal Health Coverage), governance and education.
