NBSSI leveraged on technology during COVID-19 pandemic – Yankey-Ayeh

The Executive Director of the National Board for Small Scale Industries (NBSSI), Kosi Yankey-Ayeh has stated that her outfit took advantage of technology to reach out to its stakeholders during the outbreak of the global pandemic COVID-19.

Speaking at the Graphic Business-Access Bank Breakfast Meeting in Accra, Mrs Yankey-Ayeh said the only way to help small businesses grow in the country is to take advantage of the new opportunities available through technology.

“SME’s are the engine of growth. Many years many speakers talk about growth but very few people do much about this engine growth but for us, at the Ghana Enterprises Agency our goal is to really see how best we can turn these businesses or MSME’s into engines of growth using digital solutions.

"What are some of these digital solutions then? The applications that will support businesses like what Access bank shared with us in terms of payments, in terms of finding access to raw materials for products, in terms of using technology to sell their products. Now everybody is on the phone they are either looking at someone’s dress or shoe to buy or either looking out for opportunities to sell yours,” she said.

She further stated that COVID-19 pushed and empowered lots of businesses in Ghana to go digital and that is a good wake-up call for the growth of the economy.

“We cannot underestimate that one thing that propelled and pushed the digitization and the push for digital solutions to build and strengthen the resilience of our SME’s and that one thing was COVID-19. COVID happened and we all didn’t have an excuse, we didn’t have access, we didn’t have anywhere to turn and for most of us we had to then turn to digitization to find solutions to the problems we have been faced with, to find solutions to problems that have persisted for years that we have been talking about,” she added.