Mahama: Accra Reset Needs Global Community Support
President Mahama: Accra Reset Agenda Needs Global Community Support to Succeed
President John Mahama has made it clear that Ghana’s Accra Reset agenda cannot succeed on its own. According to him, any industrialisation push tied to the Reset will need access to at least the African regional market to actually sell what gets produced meaning global cooperation isn’t optional, it’s essential.
Speaking at a high-level side event on the Accra Reset: Global Reset Dialogue during the 81st United Nations General Assembly in New York on September 21, Mahama laid out the core tension at the heart of his agenda.
We are resetting our national economy, fiscal management, governance structures, and industrial sector. But as we undertake this heavy lifting at home, one truth becomes clear: you cannot successfully reset a national house if the global architecture around it remains fundamentally flawed, he said.
Mahama was careful to explain that Ghana’s domestic reforms built around economic self-reliance, local value addition, stronger public health infrastructure, transparent governance, and the 24-Hour Economy initiative mirror exactly what the Accra Reset is trying to achieve on the global stage.
He used the health sector as a concrete example. Resetting healthcare, he explained, doesn’t mean simply constructing new hospitals and then waiting for foreign donors to supply vaccines or IV fluids. It means building real local industrial capacity encouraging Ghanaian pharmaceutical companies to manufacture essential medicines domestically, backed by guaranteed government purchasing and access to regional markets.
Mahama opened his remarks by thanking Presidents Olusegun Obasanjo, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and Laura Chinchilla for welcoming the gathering on behalf of the Guardians’ Circle, describing them as the moral and intellectual foundation of the entire initiative.
He recalled that exactly one year earlier, in the same city, the Accra Reset was launched out of a collective refusal to accept that the only answer to a shrinking, fragmenting global aid system was simply asking more eloquently for charity.
At that launch, he said, three burdens weighing down the Global South were identified: geostrategic marginalisation, where others write the rules that shape their destiny; geopolitical vulnerability, where decisions made thousands of miles away can unravel national plans overnight; and donor dependence, where citizens’ access to life-saving services hinges on funding decisions entirely outside their control.
For Mahama, these aren’t three separate problems they’re interconnected threads of the same broken system, and untangling them requires connecting political authority, productive capability, and financial resilience.
Mahama traced the roots of this frustration back to history. In 1955, twenty-nine nations gathered in Bandung demanding a seat at the global table. Political independence followed — flags were raised, anthems sung yet control over global trade, finance, and health governance remained elsewhere.
Fifty years later, in 2005, the world convened in Paris and crowned “country ownership” as the guiding principle of development cooperation. Mahama didn’t mince words about how hollow that phrase turned out to be in practice. “It was a pleasant phrase. But in truth, we were handed a broken cauldron; we were asked to own a soup cooked entirely in someone else’s kitchen!” he said.
His declaration through the Accra Reset was direct: there can be no ownership without control. But he was equally blunt with fellow leaders across the Global South simply shifting power from distant boardrooms into unaccountable ministries at home won’t magically produce sovereignty either.
“If we demand control, we must earn it through uncompromising domestic accountability,” he said, pointing to Ghana’s own tightened fiscal controls and anti-corruption efforts as evidence of that principle in action. His formulation was clear: no ownership without control, but also no control without absolute accountability to the people.
Over the past year, Mahama said, Ghana has built the actual machinery behind this philosophy establishing the Presidential Council, forming the Guardians’ Circle, and creating a High-Level Panel on Reform of the Global Health Architecture and Governance.
He credited the Panel’s Co-Chairs Peter Piot, Elhadj As Sy, Priscila Ferraz Soares, and Budi Gunadi Sadikin along with Special Advisor Michel Sidibé and the wider Panel membership, for delivering on the bold mandate he set for them in Dakar back in July: avoid vague diplomatic language, pick their battles carefully, and write for the ordinary citizen in the Global South.
The result is a new report, “A Sovereign Future for Health,” which sets out ten practical recommendations for reforming global health governance. Mahama was emphatic that this moment marks a shift from design to actual execution, warning against the familiar pattern of visionary ideas launched with fanfare only to quietly die in diplomatic corridors.
Over the coming months, Ghana and the Presidential Council plan to bring together governments, global health bodies, development finance institutions, philanthropies, and the private sector to turn these recommendations into country-level agreements. Mahama specifically invited partners from Brazil’s Fiocruz, along with institutions across India, Indonesia, the Gulf, and Africa, to help build self-sustaining networks linking research, regulation, local manufacturing, and distribution.
Mahama was careful to frame this sovereign health agenda as something other than a retreat inward. Instead, he described it as a pursuit of pragmatic interdependence equal partnerships built on mutual respect, where stronger, more self-reliant nations in the Global South actually make the entire world safer, rather than posing a threat to the Global North.
He welcomed leaders from France, Spain, the United Kingdom, the G77, the OECD, and the Commonwealth who attended the event, offering particular thanks to former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown for taking on the task of mobilising global political leadership around what Mahama called the “New Global Bargain.”
Addressing the argument that structural reform should wait until global tensions ease, Mahama disagreed firmly. In his view, crisis is exactly when new paradigms get forged.
Explaining why health was chosen as the starting point for this global reset, Mahama pointed to sobering statistics nearly seven out of ten maternal deaths worldwide occur in Sub-Saharan Africa, and Ghana itself remains three times above the recommended SDG target.
He pointed to two initiatives working to change that: the Mother Africa initiative, championed by Tanzanian President Samia Suluhu Hassan, and the Business United for Mothers, Babies and Youth (BUMBY) campaign, which brings public policy and corporate responsibility together to protect mothers and children. These efforts, he said, will serve as a real-time stress test for the new financial and governance architecture being built.
He also thanked WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus for his continued support of global health reform.
With Ghana set to assume the Chairmanship of the African Union in 2027, Mahama committed to carrying the Reset agenda into the continent’s broader policy framework, working alongside the Non-Aligned Movement and the G77 plus China.
He closed by formally launching “A Sovereign Future for Health” on behalf of the Presidential Council, framing the moment as a turning point where the responsibility now shifts from the Panel to everyone gathered to actually deliver on its promise.
His final words tied the entire agenda back to something deeply human ownership backed by real control, cooperation defined by human dignity, and promises that translate into real protection for every baby girl born that night, whether in Kathmandu, Arusha, or Damongo.
