The National Entrepreneurship Innovation Programme (NEIP) has launched the NEIP Hub Acceleration Grant Programme under the Ghana Economic Transformation Project to support entrepreneurship and innovation hubs, as well as fight the unemployment situation in Ghana.
According to the Chief Executive of NEIP, Kofi Ofosu Nkansah, the grant programme is geared towards supporting the development of the entrepreneurship ecosystem by building the capacities of the entrepreneurship hubs and strengthening their growth models, to ensure economic transformation and growth of startups in the country.
Speaking during the launch of the programme, Chief Executive of NEIP, Mr. Nkansah said the hubs will be required to support and nurture the ideas of startups in the country.
“We are going to provide support to the entrepreneurship and innovation hubs across the country; so about 50 of them. Now, what do these hubs do? What they do is to do hand holding of firms in their communities, nurture the ideas of startups, support them; run incubator programmes, run accelerator programmes, ensure that we are seeding ventures in the community.
“As the ventures are nurtured and planted and they mature, they grow to become big SMEs and they will be able to hire more people. That is why government is providing this capacity building support to the entrepreneurship hubs so that they can upgrade their offices, buy more equipments if they have some soft things to upgrade like websites, they will be able to do that, they can run active programmes, which the firms in their communities will take advantage of.”
Mr. Nkansah
The Hub Acceleration Grant Programme seeks to provide entrepreneurs the financial and technical support to enhance their services to benefit startups in the country.
Selected hubs according to the CEO of NEIP, will receive grants amounting to $200,000, that will support their operation, upgrade their offices and equipments and run their acceleration programmes.
Moreover, Mr. Nkansah said that firms privileged to undergo training under the programme will also be given development support; how to do financial management, book keeping, manage the business aspect of their firms, communication and more.
This, he emphasized will cause the firms to grow, which in turn will cause them to employ more people and indirectly, help solve the unemployment problem in the nation.
NEIP Adopts a framework to ensure efficient use of its funds
The CEO of NEIP, Mr. Nkansah indicated that the programme has put in place a framework that will serve as a checks and balance scheme to ensure efficient appropriation of funds invested.
“We have a very robust monitoring and evaluation framework, an accountability system. Right from the hubs, though the NEIP, our monitoring and evaluation officers will do field visits to ensure that the hubs are using the funds for the purpose for which they were given.”
Mr. Nkansah
Also speaking during the launch, Chairman for the Ghana Hub Network, Josiah Kwesi Eyison added that the support was timely and would help develop startups in the country.
“The growth of hubs in Ghana was one thing that is linked to a lot of the work that NEIP has done in the past and as people, they have been working in the private sector supporting entrepreneurs.
“Having a programme such as this grant Programme that is going to be launched to support hubs, I will say has come at the right time and a lot of the objectives that it seeks to achieve; supporting hubs themselves to strengthen themselves, benchmarks the programmes that we do and the aim of supporting the entrepreneurial ecosystem to match against what Africa has to offer. I think the vision that is driven by the team in NEIP has to be supported.”
Mr. Eyison
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