District Assemblies urged to support Small and Medium scale businesses

Mr Kwasi Afriyie Badu, Chief Executive Officer, KAB Governance Consult, has urged district and municipal assemblies to support small and medium scale industries within their jurisdiction to thrive.

This is because those industries have the potential to reduce poverty, unemployment and provide reliable sources of revenue to the assemblies.

Mr Badu was speaking during a dialogue between the media and small and medium scale business community in Kpandu, initiated by the Ghana Journalists Association and KAB Governance Consult.

The dialogue sponsored by the Business Sector Advocacy Challenge (BUSAC) Fund seeks to engage the media in strengthening business advocacy.

Mr Badu urged the assemblies to "repent" their lukewarm attitude towards the development of those industries, which are crucial to the viability of the assemblies themselves.

He noted that apart from direct central government interventions most district assemblies seemed to be doing nothing significant to promote small businesses.

"Some District Assemblies even engaged the services of small businesses on credit over several months, thereby killing such businesses slowly," Mr Badu observed.

He said it was wrong and unlawful for the assemblies to fix fees, which were binding on commercial entities without involving them in arriving at those crucial decisions.

Mr Badu therefore advised district assemblies, which have not yet gazetted their fee fixing resolutions to organize open forums to allow inputs from the small-scale sector to reflect in those fees.

Mr Pius Adanuti, Kpando District Chief Executive advised people in small scale businesses to form vibrant associations for easy identification and assistance.

He said the major problem of entrepreneurs in the district was lack of access to credit and expressed the hope that some rural banks would soon locate in the district to offer credit to people in the sector.

Mr Adanuti said the Assembly would soon organize a district industrialization exhibition and hoped entrepreneurs in the district would take advantage of it to market their products.