National Program Coordinator for Sustaining Competitive and Responsible Enterprises (SCORE), Samuel Asiedu, has revealed the relevance of training enterprises in the country.

According to him, the major intervention of the training programme offers both practical classroom engagements and in-factory consulting.

To achieve this, the International Labour Organisation in partnership with some other agencies organized a three-day fundraising workshop. The workshop was to equip partners on how to raise funds for “Sustaining Competitive and Responsible Enterprises.”

Speaking at the workshop, Mr. Asiedu revealed that, the workshop is to help build capacities of investors. This, he explained, will help them to access resources to support the training of SMEs.

He further revealed that, the ILO will no longer fund the programme because SCORE is at Phase 3. This means that, the programme is matured and will progress well once turned over to new investors.

“It is apparent that training is key when it comes to the development of enterprises. Enterprises that receive and apply training have higher performances as compared to other enterprises that do not receive training. Unfortunately, in Ghana our interest in training is on the lower side.”

Training to improve competitiveness

Additionally, Mr. Asiedu maintained that, SCORE is committed to improving and promoting training which will ensure productivity amongst businesses. According to him, this will help businesses leverage on the resource which are available to them.

“Many of the enterprises do not have it on their plans. But at SCORE, we’re promoting training, training that would improve upon the competitiveness, the productivity and quality of enterprises.

“So, this workshop is seeking to strengthen the capacity of our implementing partners that deliver SCORE to SMEs to be able to leverage resources that are around us”.

On his part, the Head of Research and Consultancy at the Chartered Institute of Bankers, Professor Samuel Lartey urged businesses to build on their human resource units.

Profit activity of businesses

He insisted that, this is one of the crucial elements in determining the success or failure of any business.

“I knew that once I was coming to present, my constituency will be expecting me to be talking about donor funding like USAID. But I just wanted to remind them that before we even get there, let us reflect on what we already have. We should look at our profit activities, our loss activities in our organizations.

“If it is too difficult to identify profit and loss activities; note that whatever will feed your company is a profit activity, feed it to feed you and whatever will eat your company is a loss activity, starve it and make work grow”.

The workshop was themed “Partnerships Building and Fundraising Workshop for Implementing Partners”. Issues relevant to discussions included fundraising and mapping of potential funding agencies in Ghana. Equally, funding cycles and strategic directions of partners were treated. Essentials of a winning proposal, institutional structures and arrangements required by funding partners and networking and partnership building for funding were also tackled.