The Ghana National Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GNCCI) in collaboration with the Development Bank Ghana (DBG) presents a business skills development programme for 1000 Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs) to enable members to remain competitive to enhance their business operations.
The objective of the programme is to improve the hard and soft skills of the Ghanaian private sector, has been designed using a proactive strategy that takes into consideration each private sector’s unique needs as a result of the Chamber’s engagements with the local and international business community.
Other factors considered are the Chamber’s business diagnostics data on the performance of businesses and industries, needs assessment of members, engagement with stakeholders in the business community, and understanding of the general eligibility criteria of DBG.
The partnership between GNCCI and Development Bank Ghana (DBG) will help to promote the optimization and achievement of their respective mandates in capacity building and research/data diagnostics. The workshops will be organised in five locations (Accra, Koforidua, Tarkwa, Takoradi, and Cape Coast) across three main areas and will aim to train businesses to scale-up their operations as well as de-risking them to be able to access loans from DBG’s participating financial institutions.
The workshop will identify 500 MSMEs (100 per location) by building baseline data of these businesses by sector, region, and ownership (women-led/ youth) to be trained on the digital platform under the Ghana Integrated Financial Ecosystem (GIFE) for onward on-boarding.
Mr. Clement Osei-Amoako, the President of GNCCI, said the contributions of the Chamber to the growth and development of the Ghanaian private sector cannot be overemphasized. Over the past decades, the GNCCI has engaged and continues to work with Government and stakeholders (both local and international) at various levels to promote and protect the interest of commercial and industrial activities in the country.
Accordingly, the GNCCI has yet again taken a bold initiative to collaborate with DBG, to first and foremost, empower its member firms with the requisite business skills to scale-up their business operations and de-risk them to access long-term capital. The Chamber’s rationale for this collaboration is informed by its deep insight and foresight of the persistent issues affecting the business community.
Mr. Osei-Amoako stated that in addition, the Chamber’s robust analytical framework that periodically mobilises business diagnostics data allows it to document and track the growth and performances of businesses, industries and policy institutions in Ghana.
“I urge our member-firms to maximise the unique opportunity afforded by the digital platform (Ghana Integrated Financial Ecosystem – GIFE) along the five pillars: SME Financial Empowerment Platform; Market Place and Financial Trade Corridor; Connected Digital Financing; Reputational Building; and Equity Growth,” he noted. He said the Chamber remains dedicated to the growth and prosperity of businesses through its cutting-edge business support.
Commenting on the workshop, Mr. Michael Mensah-Baah, the Deputy CEO of DBG, said the Bank had been designed to help relieve the bottlenecks that have hindered the availability of long-term, competitively priced loans, to small and medium-sized enterprises in Ghana. According to him, Small business owners often do not have the access to the capital they need to grow and are often seen as too risky by banks. “Addressing the lack of long-term financing that drives the kinds of investment that will lead to sustainable growth, is a gap that must be addressed,” the Deputy CEO said.
The DBG employ a wholesale banking model – this means that we provide funding to eligible financial institutions to on-lend to Ghanaian businesses in targeted industry sectors. DBG has identified agribusiness, manufacturing, ICT, and high-value services as the catalytic sectors of the economy to focus on. “Our business model allows us to leverage the networks and existing infrastructure of banks and financial institutions that partner with us to provide business advisory services and training in addition to financing.”
At DBG we often speak about the need to Do it Different – partnerships are critical to the way we execute our work, and this has a lot of relevance for today. “We are very grateful to GNCCI for organising this capacity-building programme to develop and strengthen the soft and hard skills of its members to stay competitive and improve their business operations,” he added.