Kwame Adu-Mante, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Focus 1 Group of Companies
Mr Kwame Adu-Mante, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Focus 1 Group of Companies has urged the youth to seek policies that would help them unearth and nurture their potentials for the development and growth of the nation's economy.
He said they should not only be interested in the freebies they would get from politicians but rather channel their requests to get them to formulate development-oriented policies and programmes to enhance their living conditions.
Mr Adu-Mante in this regard, implored them to get involved in the local politics in their communities to push legislators to help formulate policies that can drive innovation and grow potentials.
According to him, some of the policy regulations currently in the country have been alien to business growth and have the tendency to kill potentials and culminating into joblessness.
He bewailed the situation where startups did not have tax rebates but foreign investors, especially those that operated in the Free Zones enclave were given rebates to the detriment of the Ghanaian investors.
Mr Adu-Mante gave the advice when speaking on entrepreneurship at this year’s “Made in Taadi” youth seminar pioneered by the hiplife artiste Kofi Kinaata in Takoradi.
He defined an entrepreneur as one who finds a need in society and creatively solves it with the end result, culminating into profits contrary to what people think of just registering a business and having a business account to solicit for funds.
He contended that the focus of entrepreneurship should not be focused on profit making, but the creativity in it which is solving society’s nagging problems.
He recounted when he used to sell anything he chanced on at the Takoradi Market Circle to take care of his Polytechnic education and challenged the youth to embrace hardwork and shun shyness to find their feet in life.
He, therefore, called on the youth to build networks by collaborating with others in order to position themselves better to attract investors who may show interest in their ventures.
Mr Adu-Mante stated that challenges to entrepreneurship in Ghana could be grouped into internal and external factors.
He mentioned some of the internal factors as trying to own everything, lack of passion and failure to gather details about the business in scaling up, while the external factors could be unfair competition and government policies and regulations.
Mr Adu-Mante called on the youth to build relationships with key personalities like lawyers that could help them in legal matters and accountants who could also assist them with their account documentations.
