The National Board for Small Scale Industries (NBSSI) will, from next week, start assisting 500 Micro, Small and Medium-Scale Businesses (MSMEs) nationwide to digitise their operations as part of efforts to maximise their potential for growth.
Under a project being implemented with support from the German Development Corporation (GIZ), the beneficiaries would be equipped with digital tools needed to upgrade their businesses and make them more viable to access more finance.
The NBSSI Executive Director, Mrs Kosi Yankey-Ayeh, who announced this in Accra, yesterday, said the project, which aims at helping MSMEs to take advantage of the digital drive, would end in March, next year.
She was speaking at a forum for women entrepreneurs held as part of the 2nd Ghana Women Entrepreneurship Summit (GWES 2020), slated for November 3 and 4, 2020.
Organised by the NBSSI, Mastercard Foundation Young Africa Works and BUSAC Fund, the summit is a biennial event which aims to enhance women-led businesses.
This year’s edition is on the theme “Ghanaian women entrepreneurs: The cornerstone of economic resilience.”
The forum which brought together about 70 women-led MSMEs and resource persons from the business sector was on the theme “Going digital, a must to building resilience in the age of technology.”
According to Mrs Yankey-Ayeh, digitisation was one of the focus of the Board because it was key to business development and relevant to business due to the evolving ways of doing business in a digital age.
Without digitisation, she said, a business’ access to market and finance was limited.
Giving highlights of other projects , Mrs Yankey-Ayeh said the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) Kaizen project which was supporting about 2,000 businesses, had been extended for five years to help other enterprises.
She mentioned the Mastercard Foundation Young Africa Works, the Nkosuo Programme and the Coronavirus Alleviation Programme Business Support Scheme (CAP BuSS) as some of the avenues through which NBSSI was aiding businesses.
These programmes, she said, had been either introduced or augmented through restructuring and partnerships, over the last four years that had increased the NBSSI funding from about $19,000 in 2017 to about one billion cedis.
“All the on-going projects are strategically designed to give priority to women and youth [because] women businesses account for 44.6 per cent of all registered businesses making Ghana number one in women-led businesses in Africa.”
Mr Amos Odere, a Mastercard Foundation programme partners, urged women-led business to not only take advantage of the opportunities being provided but position themselves digitally well to grow their businesses else their ventures would fade away.
BY JONATHAN DONKOR
