The Ghana Enterprises Agency Bill, when assented to by the President to become law, will not only convert the current National Board for Small Scale Industries (NBSSI) into an agency but will also give it the mandate to create a fund with the aim of addressing the financial needs of entrepreneurs in the country.
This was disclosed by the Executive Director of the NBSSI, Kosi Yankey-Ayeh.
The Ghana Enterprises Agency Bill was passed in Parliament last week; awaiting the President’s assent, after which NBSSI will be known as the ‘Ghana Enterprises Agency’.
This is part of government’s plan to assist MSMEs financially to expand.
Speaking on the sidelines of the 2020 Ghana Women Entrepreneurship Summit; the Executive Director of the National Board for Small Scale Industries, Kosi Yankey-Ayeh, told journalists the changes were necessitated by the increasing responsibility of the Board and the growing needs of industries.
“It’s very important to note that COVID-19 brought to light a lot of the sectors that we had overlooked many times in the work we do. There’s trade, and there’s industry and then enterprises, and under the enterprises, come all cross section sectors of the work we did, which is something we never used to look at when we were working as NBSSI. Now, this new agency is bigger than we think. It looks not only at Micro and small (scale businesses). The NBSSI, really focused more on the Micro and small and did not look at medium and really, the trajectory improvements on these businesses and this new Act looks at it.”
“There’s also a strong component of funding which the old Act did not look at. There’s an SME fund that is part of what this act is supposed to look at, because the foundation and the fundamentals of the work we’ve been doing and what we realize was that one of the biggest challenges has been access to finance,” she said.
