NBSSI Board members tour Brong Ahafo

Sunyani (B/A), Feb. 17, GNA - Through the National Board for Small Scale Industries (NBSSI) the government can create jobs for the people to get money in their pockets, Mr. Ibrahim Zubairu, a Board member of NBSSI said last Friday.

He said the mandate of government was not necessarily to be involved in the direct provision of employment for the masses but rather provide the essential conditions, structures and the enabling environment for the informal sector and the organizations and institutions in the formal sector to perform that responsibility on her behalf. Mr. Zubairu was speaking in Sunyani during a visit to the Sunyani Municipal BAC as part of a nationwide tour by the NBSSI Board to do situational analysis about the state of the BACs in the districts and the municipalities.

Mr. Zubairu who is also a lecturer at the Accra Polytechnic, stated that the Business Advisory Centres (BACs) were actually to create opportunities for the people in the various districts to establish their own businesses with training and facilitation from the NBSSI/BACs to operate and better their economic lots in the districts. "Thus the government indirectly will be creating jobs for the people all over the country and consequently achieve the better Ghana agenda", he added.

The NBSSI Board has been zoned into four groups to cover the entire country, and accompanying Mr. Zubairu was Ms. Vivian Ankrah, also a Board member and Chief Executive Officer of Atlas Car Rental Company Limited in Accra. Besides the Sunyani BAC, the rounds took them to other BACs at Wenchi, Nsawkaw, Techiman, Kintampo and Bechem in the Brong-Ahafo Region.

Mr. Zubairu said they had earlier visited some selected BACs in the Volta, Northern, Upper East and West Regions, as well as Atinpoku district in the Eastern Region to bring to 28 the number of BACs visited by the Board. He indicated that the visit was to identify the problems and challenges of the BACs/NBSSIs on the ground to see how they could be resourced and revamped to impact effectively on the Micro-Small Enterprises (MSEs) in the country.

Mr. Zubairu said one of the functions of the NBSSI board was to advise government about how to support MSEs financially and logistically, adding that "throughout the tour the common problem confronting all the centres are funding and logistics".

He observed that the NBSSI had been rendered inactive and therefore unable to take legal action against non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and other allied bodies that were duplicating its functions because "the NBSSI Legislative Instrument (LI) 434 (1981) that established it has not as yet been operationalized ".

He explained that on the MSE landscape, the concerned NGOs were expected to operate as stakeholders and collaborators alongside the NBSSI/BACs to ensure sanity in the promotion of MSEs but that "they are all doing their own thing".

Mr. Zubairu therefore stressed the need for some form of control over the activities of those NGOs duplicating the functions of the NBSSI to ensure continuous and regular quality advisory services to the MSEs for their stability and growth.

Mr. Zubairu expressed the hope that the LI 434 would soon be passed into law to empower the NBSSI to exercise supervisory control over the NGOs and the other organizations that related with the MSEs. He added that presently with no law of the sort in operation, the missing link is the lack of monitoring and evaluation programmes undertaken by NGOs, hoping that the gap could easily be filled if a law existed to compel the NGOs to collaborate with the NBSSI.

Madam Beatrice Boakye, Brong-Ahafo Regional Manageress of the NBSSI, disclosed that the government of Ghana was financing 10 out of the 14 BACs operating in the region, whilst the Rural Enterprise Project (REP) was also funding the remaining four.

She said notwithstanding the obsolete equipment, inadequate remuneration and low morale of staff, the region's outlook for this year is to have clusters of honey, cashew drink and nut production, gari processing and mushroom growing.

Madam Boakye explained that it was a strategic decision to restrict their operation to the agro-processing industry because the congenial factors were prevalent in the region. The Regional Manageress said her outfit had therefore adopted services like the provision of assistance in business registration, basic accounting and book keeping skills, as well as identifying and linking operators to market sources. She explained that the rationale was to ensure that the MSEs are moved from the level of survival to that of growth. 17 Feb. 10