The Songhai Group hosts Ghana Go Global workshop
A country's knowledge capital can be estimated looking at what it produces and sells to the rest of the world.Today a bulk of Ghana’s economic growth is coming from selling resources dug from the ground and shipped outside.That is not sustainable.
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The only way to generate the next big level of economic growth is by harnessing existing knowledge through innovation and entrepreneurship. There is the need to create more high value jobs, in the face of a tsunami of global competition.
Over the last decade or so, countries and regions have struggled with the fact that most of their startups grow to about eight to 20 employees, and then their growth stalls out. Soon, they begin to wither and die, or struggle along on life support from government handouts.
How can Ghana take the lessons learned from other regions and ensure that more of our young ambitious companies achieve sustainable growth, create high value jobs and suppliers, and earn their rightful place on
To help provide some answers to this question, The Songhai Group is working with Ken Morse, the founder and MIT's Entrepreneurship programme to build upon these learnings and tie into other entrepreneurship hubs around the world to run a series of training workshops specifically designed to provide the most appropriate coaching and support for Ghana’s most ambitious firms, both large and young to scale and sell to companies globally.
Ghana Go Global (3G), is a global growth programme which is aimed at enabling ambitious innovative companies to achieve their full potential.
The carefully selected companies with high potential for global growth seek to increase their annual revenues by 800 per cent to 1,000 per cent within five years.
The programme, led by Songhai and Entrepreneurship Ventures, provides training and coaching and then creates links to European and US customers, and the Boston entrepreneurial ecosystem.
Local companies will be connected not only to innovative companies but also gain access to centres of excellence such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the Kendall Square/Route 128 entrepreneurial ecosystem.
Companies will be taught and coached by experienced business people with proven track records who will deliver just in time training, and design a custom coaching programme for each participating company. This programme has been run successfully in USA, UK, Spain, Canada and Turkey.
Under the Ghana Go Global (3G) Programme, Ghanaian entrepreneurs who want to be coached, not by academic theory, but by other successful entrepreneurs who have launched multimillion dollar companies and have walked in their shoes, who know what works (and what doesn’t), and have demonstrated repeated success in the cruel crucible of the marketplace.
Why shouldn't new companies emerge from our local pool of talent to tie in with a global venture community and be the ones who list on Wall Street and dominate their markets globally?
Ken Morse
Ken Morse, a founding Managing Director the MIT Entrepreneurship programme (1996-2006) and a serial entrepreneur himself who has launched six high tech companies (3Com, Aspen Technology and four other startups), and a global sales veteran will lead the discussion.
In his words, “five either had IPOs or were successfully merged; one was a complete disaster.” Not a bad track record for a man who subsequently served for 13 years as Founding Managing Director of The MIT Entrepreneurship Centre, and co-founded President Obama’s National Advisory Council for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (NACIE) with Steve Case. – GB