Recognising the Advocate: Ziad Hamoui Receives the ASSETS Senior Fellows Award

On 27 September 2025, at Ghana Shippers House in Accra, the African Start-Ups and SMEs in Export and Trade Secretariat, known as ASSETS, formally recognised Ziad Hamoui, National President of Borderless Alliance in Ghana, with its Senior Fellows Award. The recognition was granted in acknowledgment of his advocacy efforts and his contributions to advancing regional trade and economic development, both within Ghana and across West Africa more broadly.

For an organisation like Borderless Alliance, whose work spans committee meetings, border-post technical visits, corridor validation workshops, and international conferences, the award served as an unusually public marker of impact in a body of work that otherwise accumulates quietly, through the sort of unglamorous, sustained institutional engagement documented throughout the Alliance’s 2025 activity, rather than through singular, headline-grabbing achievements.

ASSETS describes the recognition as a testament to the continuing impact of Borderless Alliance’s advocacy in tackling barriers to regional trade and transport across West Africa, language that ties the award directly to the organisation’s core mission rather than treating it as a generic honour. The framing situates Hamoui’s individual recognition within the collective, ongoing effort of the Alliance itself, an organisation built specifically around the goal of making West African borders less of an obstacle and more of a passage.

The ASSETS Summit, held on the same day as the award ceremony, was itself a substantial gathering rather than a simple award presentation. It featured an exhibition of local products, giving Ghanaian entrepreneurs and exporters a platform to showcase goods aimed at both domestic and export markets, and an induction of the fellows of the Export-Import Academy, marking the formal entry of a new cohort into a programme designed to build export capability among Ghanaian businesses.

Kutana Technologies delivered a technical presentation at the summit, adding a technology and innovation dimension to a day that otherwise centred on trade policy, advocacy, and export capacity building. The inclusion of a technology-focused session alongside the awards and exhibition reflects a broader recognition within Ghana’s trade community that digital tools are becoming inseparable from effective export and cross-border trade strategy, a theme that echoed elsewhere in Borderless Alliance’s 2025 engagements, including the digitalisation panel at LLDC3 in Turkmenistan weeks earlier.

A panel discussion under the theme ‘Beyond Borders: Made in Ghana, Sold to the World’ rounded out the summit’s substantive programming, directly engaging with the ambition that runs through much of Ghana’s trade policy conversation: moving beyond simply producing goods for domestic consumption toward building genuinely export-competitive industries capable of reaching international markets. The panel’s framing connects naturally to Borderless Alliance’s own advocacy, since export competitiveness depends heavily on the trade facilitation infrastructure the Alliance works to improve.

The summit also featured the launch of ASSETS’ upcoming trade mission to South Africa, a forward-looking element that gave the day’s proceedings a practical next step beyond ceremony and discussion. Trade missions of this kind offer Ghanaian exporters direct exposure to a major African market, and announcing one at a summit already focused on export capacity and cross-border trade tied the day’s various threads, awards, exhibition, panel discussion, together around a concrete upcoming opportunity.

Hamoui was not the only senior figure recognised that day. Other senior awardees included the Deputy Chief Executive for Operations of the Ghana Shippers Authority, Mrs Sylvia Asana Owu, and the Coordinator of the National Office of the AfCFTA, Mr Benjamin Asiam, among other eminent representatives of the private sector and international development community. The shared recognition placed Borderless Alliance’s advocacy work in direct company with figures from Ghana’s port logistics and continental free trade institutions, an apt grouping given how closely those domains intersect with the Alliance’s own focus.

That the award and the broader summit took place at Ghana Shippers House is itself notable, given how frequently that venue recurs across Borderless Alliance’s 2025 calendar, having hosted the Time Release Study technical meeting in August of the same year. Ghana Shippers House has effectively become one of the central meeting points for Ghana’s trade facilitation community, and the ASSETS Summit’s choice of venue placed the award ceremony within a space already deeply associated with the kind of institutional work being honoured.

The Senior Fellows Award, arriving near the end of a year that had already carried Hamoui and Borderless Alliance through technical visits, quarterly committee meetings, corridor workshops, and international panels on three continents, offered a moment to formally register what had otherwise unfolded as a continuous, largely unheralded stream of advocacy work. It is worth noting that the recognition came not for any single achievement but for a sustained pattern of engagement, exactly the kind that this catalogue of 2025 activity, taken as a whole, makes visible.