Govt earmarks GH¢10m for women entrepreneurs
Government has earmarked GH¢10 million to support young women entrepreneurs. The modalities for the fund, which basically targets the start-up businesses of young female entrepreneurs, will be ready in two months, by which time the target group will be able to access it.
The Minister for Business Development, Mr Ibrahim Awal, announced this at a meeting dubbed: The Women Entrepreneurship Conference, in Accra on Tuesday.
Advertisement
The meeting, organised by the Ministry of Business Development, brought together female entrepreneurs, policy makers and the banking sector to dialogue on the challenges facing women entrepreneurs and find pragmatic solutions to them.
It was held on the theme: “Unleashing women entrepreneurship for inclusive growth”.
The initiative is also to give a boost to the government’s quest to ensure production inclusion, as well as its policy to use entrepreneurship as one of the major tools to resolve the unemployment situation by creating an enabling environment for entrepreneurship.
Good business managers
Mr Awal said women were, no doubt, very good managers of businesses, and given the opportunity, they would do better than men.
“What we have to do as individuals and collectively is remove the shackles that hinder women’s prosperity. The President wants to create an inclusive society and he cannot do that without empowering women,” he said.
That, he said, had informed the initiative, the details of which the Ministry of Finance was working out to make it available in a couple of months.
He encouraged women not to be discouraged when they failed in their businesses and other attempts because most successful business persons had failed a number of times.
Second Lady
In her remarks as the guest of honour, the Second Lady, Mrs Samira Bawumia, said it was a well-known fact that women were very active participants in the growth of economies across sub-Saharan Africa.
She said there was considerable evidence that most businesses in Africa were owned and run by women, but those businesses were more likely to be small-scale enterprises in the informal sector.
“Women engage in low value-added activities that only reap marginal benefits, primarily because they are entrepreneurs out of necessity and not of opportunity,” she said.
She said there were many studies that had shown that investing in women had a multiplier effect, stressing that there was the need to focus on the contributions women made towards the acceleration of economic development and inclusive growth.
Challenges
Mrs Bawumia said, however, that women faced great challenges and had to grapple with many constraints in their effort to raise funds and mobilise revenue, a situation that set them back in their pursuit of entrepreneurship and economic empowerment.
She noted that access to capital and other economic resources was the main barrier to many women entrepreneurs and attributed the situation to factors such as lower levels of education and financial literacy, lower income levels, lack of tangible assets or collateral, legal constraints, time and mobility constraints, socio-cultural constraints and a lack of market exposure.
She, however, expressed optimism that those challenges were surmountable and said efforts were being made by the government to address some of them in the short, medium and long term.
In her remark as the Chairperson for the event, the Presidential Advisor on Gender and Development, Ms Angela Asante, said as the first-named African president to champion women’s equality in Africa, President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo was determined to create the enabling environment for women’s empowerment in Ghana.
He was determined to make gender equality and equity a culture in the business environment, she added.
For her part, a representative of the Diaspora African Forum, Dr Erieka Bennet, told women that business was not just about making money but making a difference as well.
She said when women were empowered, it went beyond seeking their satisfaction to empowering society as well, which made a positive impact on national development.