The Executive Director of the National Board for Small Scale Industries (NBSSI) says the impact of the pandemic on Ghana has brought to the fore the significance of the Board as an agency for helping businesses in the country.

Speaking at a forum dubbed: “The Changing Face of Retail In Ghana: Scaling successfully with Innovation & E-commerce”, the Executive Director of NBSSI, Mrs. Kosi Yankeh-Ayeh noted that “in the past six months since March when COVID happened and the world changed a lot has happened and a lot has changed for us as a government institution, the National Board for Small Scale Industries:“.

“I think for the first time, it made the world or Ghanaians know the relevance of having an agency such as the National Board for Small Scale Industries to provide support and relief to the MSMEs in Ghana. And so a lot changed”.

Like most companies and organization, the pandemic has altered ways of doing things and the NBSSI are not exempted from its impact.

“What changed was how we even work with MSMEs across Ghana. So, the first thing we did was to look at technology; the importance of having technology as the backbone for what we do to be able to reach out to as many people as possible. And so we incorporated technology in the work we do.

“What then also changed was access to finance, and so finance becoming a very important tool and even in our programming. How do we relate that to the MSMEs that we work with, so, providing a lot of funding, looking for funding which the government committed 600 million initially and an extra GHC 150 million. This was made important because during this phase we realized that as an institution mandated to strengthen and grow MSMEs, this was a great opportunity for us to provide relief to MSMEs some of whom are here, to ensure that they get the needed resources to be able to continue with the work that they do”.

Highlighting the visible changes in her outfit especially with regard to businesses in the country, Mrs. Yankeh-Ayeh stated that, “ the way we do businesses, even how we deliver the trainings we have, being accessible and relevant to MSMEs or entrepreneurs who usually wouldn’t have worked with us became very important.

“And the kind of partnerships that we also had to work with… were all the changes that came up at the NBSSI”.

She revealed that the pandemic season equally heralded one of the key moment of the Board’s existence as it received the largest inflow of revenue.

“When I took office in 2017, the budget was approximately GHC19, 000 and I think year on year we’ve been able to grow the budget… when COVID happened I think it propelled that from moving from GHC 19,000 to almost a billion cedis in funding to support MSMEs across the nation

“Looking at COVID as well we spoke to some of the partners and one of the major things we are launching in a few days, if I should say so is the digitalization partnership with GIZ, where we are looking at digitizing about fifty MSMEs, providing them with the requisite tools to be able to really facilitate trade and really get their products out there at the level they’ve never seen before.