Empowering SMEs, Empowering Ghana

The importance of Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) development in every economy has been highlighted by World Leaders, Economists, Industry Captains and Development Oriented organizations across the world. SMEs’ importance is also supported by statistics in every country.

According to world Bank data, SMEs contribute an average of about 50% to GDP and an average of about 60% to employment in low to middle income economies. The averages are much higher for high income economies. The difference between the former and latter is the deliberate, well thought out and systematically implemented central strategy to organize, formalize and transform SMEs for long term and sustainable productivity and growth.

There is no disagreement on the subject (economic importance of SMEs) but making progress from merely accepting the importance of SMEs to actually creating and implementing a central strategy to lead the transformation of SMEs is lacking in many economies, especially sub-Saharan economies.

Careful analysis of available information suggests that in Ghana, if local businesses do not grow, unemployment and poverty will continue to prevail, and other sectors of the economy like the Banking/Financial services sector will not thrive because their survival largely depends on the sustainable growth of local businesses.

 The Chamber uses the following 5 core pillars to develop SMEs in Ghana:

• Policy Advocacy & Development
• Formalization, Capacity Building & Certification
• Central Database Management
• Shared Services 
• Support Services.

The Key Strategic Objective  of the Ghana Chamber of SMEs shall be : to expand the number of formalized, high growth SMEs by at least 5,000 each year for the next 10 years.