‘Micro, small, medium enterprises good for poverty reduction’
The Executive Director of the National Board for Small Scale Industries (NBSSI), Mr Lukman Abdul-Rahim, has stated that micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) are good instruments through which society can reduce poverty and improve standards of living, particularly, in rural areas.
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He said because they played a crucial role in job creation, wealth generation and improvement in quality of life, the development of MSMEs was crucial to the attainment of the country’s socio-economic development.
Speaking at the opening of Kaizen Forum in Kumasi, he said NBSSI recognised the need for entrepreneurs engaged in various manufacturing and service activities to modernise their operations with the view to achieving higher productivity and improving the quality of their products.
The Kaizen Forum was a platform to deliberate on a three-year project financed by both the government and Japan, aimed at providing technical support to MSMEs to sustainably improve productivity and quality of their products.
With NBSSI as a partner institution implementing the project being piloted in the Ashanti Region from 2012-2015, the NBSSI would co-ordinate project activities of the NBSSI business advisory centres in the region in the provision and facilitation of quality business.
Development services
In view of this, 36 enterprises in the region, selected from 12 assemblies, have already benefited from the Kaizen training on the project. They are the Kumasi Metropolitan Assembly (KMA), the Mampong Municipality, the Obuasi Municipality, the Bekwai Municipality and the Asokore Mampong Municipality.
The rest are the Ejisu-Juaben Municipality, the Asante Akyem Central Municipality, the Asante Akyem South, the Atwima Nwabiagya, the Bosome Freho and Ahafo Ano North districts.
The NBSSI boss said the individual entrepreneur was an important element in the development of the sector and that it was important to provide support for some entrepreneurs who started businesses without any training in the areas of management, finance and other technical services at the pre-investment, implementation and post investment phases.
He said it was the plan of NBSSI to use lessons learnt from the pilot phase of the business development services (BDS) project to expand activities to cover all the regions in the country and required the assistance of development partners, including Japan International Co-operation Agency (JICA), the government and other stakeholder institutions to implement the plans.
For his part, the Ashanti Regional Minister, Dr Samuel Sarpong, said the MSMEs sector constituted about 90 per cent of the country’s manufacturing sector hence, the largest sector within Ghana’s private sector.
The Rector of the Kumasi Polytechnic (K-POLY), Prof. Nicholas N. N. Nsowaah-Nuamah, who chaired the function, said the project was commendable as it fell in line with modern business practices.
K-Poly, he said, had manufactured a fufu-pounding machine and a wheelchair, both powered by solar in the country.