Ghana Enterprises Agency (GEA) and IE Africa Centre (IE University, Spain) have announced a partnership to promote the economic empowerment of women in Ghana, by focusing on providing leadership and development training for women entrepreneurs.
Empowering women is one of the most crucial concerns of the Millennium Development Goals of the United Nations. To help address the challenges women face and to help build a resilient economy, the Ghana Enterprises Agency (GEA) which provides business development, advisory and financial support services to entrepreneurs in the MSME sector has put in a place interventions that specifically target the economic empowerment of women in Ghana.
GEA recently launched Women Entrepreneurs Rise (WERise), a platform created to bring successful female leaders and enablers together for professional networking, skills development and knowledge-sharing. Now GEA is partnering with IE Africa Centre, an academic centre belonging to IE University to provide leadership and development training programmes.
IE Africa Centre has already provided leadership training to GEA’s executive team to equip them with skills that will allow the organisation to realse its full potential. This partnership is now being extended to include professional development for women entrepreneurs.
Speaking on the partnership, CEO of the Ghana Enterprises Agency, Mrs. Kosi Yankey-Ayeh said: “Leadership and development are crucial to driving entrepreneurship, so we need to partner with leading global universities such as IE University for institutional growth and development”.
The Centre adopts a systems change approach to entrepreneurship and leadership training, encouraging executives, teams and leaders to address policies, mindsets, or power dynamics that underlie societal issues at stake. To drive systems change at scale across the continent, IE Africa Centre collaborates with and supports strategic institutions such as the GEA with systems change coaching.
“Ghana is a key country for the IE Africa Centre because of its high number of woman-owned businesses, exceptional political leadership and shared values,” explained IE Africa Centre Director, Begoña Gomez Fernandez.
IE Africa Centre Chair, Felicia Appenteng said: “The Centre’s mission is to shine a light on African solutions to global challenges; as such, we’re extremely proud to partner with the Ghana Enterprises Agency to identify, nurture and support African entrepreneurs as they spark systems change”.
