The team leader of technical advisers, Invest for jobs (GIZ) has urged stakeholders to support Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) in other to create more jobs in the country.
According to him, investing in SMEs would also strengthen the economy of the country as it involves a higher labour force.
He said, “As part of this program, and a major component of it, I must say is for us to identify growth-oriented SMEs in Ghana, support them grow and to grow further, expand, and by so doing, create decent jobs, together with our partners.”
“We all recognize the fact that SMEs are the backbone of our economy in Ghana. They constitute I’m told and I’m aware, they engage more than 80 percent of the labor force here in Ghana. And we can not underestimate the significance of SMEs in Ghana.”
He was speaking at the official launch of the final edition of the Green SME Networking Festival in Tamale on Tuesday, October 4, 2022.
Mr. John Duti said the aim to introduce these festivals is because of climate change, hence the need for SMEs (the 100 SMEs in the festival)to consider the environment in their production processes.
“We really want to discuss green and greening. We all know, and we’re experiencing the effects of climate change. We are witnessing erratic rainfalls, we are witnessing a lot of changes in our weather, our climate that we never saw in the past 10 years, and therefore the fact that the climate has changed, we are experiencing it, then it’s incumbent on all of us in our ways to support efforts to mitigate the effects of our actions on the climate”, he said.
He urged the selected 100 SMEs to consider themselves lucky and take the three-day workshop seriously as they were selected from 397 applicants.
Meanwhile, this is the final edition of the Green Festival for the year 2022 after the first and second editions happened in Accra and Kumasi respectively.