After a year of consistently supporting Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs), the National Board for Small Scale Industry (NBSSI) now known as the Ghana Enterprise Agency (GEA), believes it has enough data to draft deliberate plans to accelerate the growth of businesses.
Kosi Yankey-Ayeh, the agency’s Executive Director said that as a result of the loan and grant portfolios created for the execution of the Coronavirus Alleviation Programme Business Support Scheme (CAP BuSS), it manufactured a structure that has helped to aggregate data on MSMEs across the country.
Speaking to the B&FT in an interview, Mrs. Yankey Ayeh said that, the migration from NBSSI to GEA would not only be a name change but their role would be to support business upgrade for economic growth.
MSMEs are estimated to account for 70 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, and represent some 92 percent of businesses. Mrs. Yankey Ayeh said with the huge number of businesses in the MSME zone and with the rich data her institution has gathered, it is time to use the sector as a pivot for economic growth.
“The data we have is so valuable. The data is more important to me than anything we have done. On a district level, I know which clusters of businesses are where, which association, their numbers, their impact, what their sector look like. I understand who is banking and not banking and why. I can give you regional, district and community break downs of this data.
We have become a strategic partner to financial institution, government, development partners among others. For the development partners, now, to design interventions, you need to know what is really happening on the ground; are people just buying and selling in the economy and how do we move them to the next level?” Mrs. Yankey Ayeh told the paper.
She added that the transformation of the NBSSI to GEA has brought with it more opportunities and avenues to gather data to support their operations nationwide. Mrs. Yankey Ayeh said a fund would be created and mechanisms must be put in place to ensure that disbursements from the fund go to the right businesses with the potential to upscale and contribute to the growth of the fund.
“With this data our interventions and even how we accelerate or grow businesses is going to change. Even under GEA, this data is going to guide us to make better interventions geared at growing business. We are embarking on a drive to gather more data outside what we have already. We want finer details that would enhance decision making,” Mrs. Yankey Ayeh intimated.
