[ 2015-08-03 ]

Push Service Personnel To SMEs
President of the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Ghana
(EFG), Sam Ato-Gaisie, says the National Service
Secretariat (NSS) must consider pushing service
personnel to small and medium enterprises.

This, he said, will help the sector to access the
much needed expertise and technical know-how to
grow and expand to contribute significantly to
socio-economic transformation aside preparing the
graduates adequately for the job market.

“The small and medium enterprises sector—which
is touted as the engine of growth—currently
lacks the requisite expertise to grow but we have
graduates who come home after national service to
sit at home because there are no jobs.

“Government must come up with a policy that will
direct the NSS to put their expertise to use in
this key economic area to boost the productivity
and contribution of the sector to national
development,” he said.

Another possibility, he said, is that such service
personnel may develop strong business acumen in
the process of practicing what they had studied in
school in a business that has been started by
someone who decided to start a business rather
than to seek for a white-collar job.

“These SMEs were started by people who chose to
work for themselves rather than seek for
non-existent jobs after school; there is therefore
the tendency for service personnel understudying
such entrepreneurs to develop the idea of starting
their own business after service.

“By so doing, we will be tackling the teeming
unemployment situation through an aggressive
entrepreneurial agenda,” he said.

The small and medium enterprises sub-sector; which
underpins the private sector, is currently faced
with the challenges of the lack of market access
and business expansion; a situation that is
largely attributable to the lack of competent
workforce with the requisite operational skills.

The concern of the entrepreneurial activist
resonate earlier calls from government, bankers
and industrialists on the need for aggressive
support to businesses in the SMEs sector,
especially those owned by women, to cushion
economic growth.

“Women-owned SMEs don’t receive the needed
attention to equip and retool their businesses to
enable them to compete effectively in the global
market.

“Considering that they account for 49 percent of
Gross Domestic Product from the informal sector
and also control more than half of businesses in
the SME sector; there is the need to empower them
to cushion economic growth,” Dolapo Ogundimu,
Managing Director of Access Bank, said on the
sidelines of a recently held capacity development
workshop for women entrepreneurs in Accra.

Source - Bus & Fin Times

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