CSIR

Story: Jasmine Afari-Mintah
A Deputy Minister of Trade, Industry, Private Sector Development and President’s Special Initiatives, Mr Kwaku Agyemang-Manu, has urged entrepreneurs to craft effective strategies to improve the competitiveness of small and medium-scale enterprises (SMEs) in the country.
He said many businesses in the country had failed in the past due to the inability of entrepreneurs to come up with effective strategies to exploit business concepts.
Mr Agyemang-Manu gave the advice in Accra at a meeting of the ECOWAS chapter of the Pan-African Competitiveness Forum (PACF).
The PACF is a new continent-wide competence and action centre that offers innovation based on competitive approaches to sub-regional economic development.
It also seeks to train entrepreneurs to learn new ideas, foster new partnerships and identify business opportunities to enhance the competitiveness of SMEs in the ECOWAS sub-region.
The deputy minister said over 90 per cent of economic activities in the sub-regions were carried out by SMEs, noting that that was a manifestation of the pivotal roles SMEs played in economic development.
“SMEs occupy a unique position in economic development and no country desirous of pursuing sustainable development can do so without a comprehensive programme for SME development,” he added.
The Director-General of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Dr A. B. Salifu, said governments in developing countries had recognised the significant role of SMEs.
He observed that the potential for the future development of micro SMEs was seen both in terms of the development of the sector itself and in its contribution to national growth and development.
Dr Salifu said bilateral and regional trade agreements continued to open up trade between major markets and partners in the developing world, saying that those countries needed to ensure that they had a critical mass of domestic enterprises to penetrate the global market.
He called on governments to identify the micro SME sector and link it with a better understanding of the scale and scope of the enterprises sector and its role in national development.
The Director of the Science and Technology Policy Research Institute of the CSIR, Dr George Essergbey, said the socio-economic survival of every nation was predicated on its capacity to compete in the global economy, noting, however, that trading in goods and services depended on the competitiveness of the various countries that wished to trade.
Participants at the PACF meeting were drawn mainly from Nigeria and other West African countries.

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