The E-Portal Business Registration Platform: The Opportunities, Challenges and Recommendations

Doing business in Ghana undoubtedly comes with a batch of challenges. Getting your business off the ground by obtaining the needed documentation could rob you of nights of sleep. Having being involved in supporting small businesses to formalize their operations, I am familiar with the ordeal one had to go through in registering a business name; long and unending queues, hours and days of waiting, loss of documents, and the confusion of not knowing whom to talk to are among some of the issues prospective business registrants had to go through.

E-Portal
The launch of the paperless system by the Registrar General’s Department, therefore, comes as a relief to many small businesses and prospective business owners.

Though many other features of the online platform are yet to be activated, the platform is proving to be a game changer and the way to go. You can imagine the excitement that greets you when you submit documents for registering a business name and in less than twenty-four (24) hours, your business name is approved and ready to be printed. This was my experience with the platform; very exciting and in the words of an expatriate friend “It does not seem we are in ‘Ghana’”.

Associated Challenges
The accompanying public sensitization on this new move by the Registrar General’s Department is rather appalling.

There are scores of important stakeholders such as Banks, Schools, the Police, Insurance Companies, District Assemblies and majority of small business owners who have no idea or have not received official communication to this effect.

At least my firm was involved in one case of having to explain this new process to a Criminal Investigation Department (CID) Officer in Sirugu in the Upper East Region after being dragged to the Police over allegations of faking a business name certificate. This could just be one in a thousand such cases across the country.

Recommendations
In order to yield the full dividends of the online platform, it will be imperative to

1. Clarify information on new business name registrations: It was not clear from the beginning that hard copies of e-certificates will be printed and deposited at the nearest Registrar General’s Department offices for later collection. It still stands publicly unclear as to how long hard copies will be generated concurrently with the e-certificates.
2. Step-Up Sensitization: Available information indicates, there is some sensitization going on. However, more needs to be done especially in rural areas. Samples of the e-certificates have never been sighted by some key stakeholders while official communication in writing has not been sent to some banks and other key stakeholders in respect of the e-certificates.
3. Improve features of the e-certificate: The e-certificate looks rather unattractive and easy to reproduce by unauthorized agents. With an improved look and appealing features maybe similar to the existing hard copy type, the public will embrace it more easily. Some institutions challenge the authenticity of the e-certificate and refuse to accept it because there is no signature placed on it though with the watermark indicating ‘Digitally Signed’.
4. Effectively synchronize the e-payment and the RGD portals: There appears to be a gap between the online payment platform and the RGD portal. Payments made by a prospective business name registrant via the e-payment platform can take days in abnormal cases to reflect on the RGD portal for processing to continue.
5. Activate the other features of the platform: While commending the RGD on the bold step in commissioning an online platform, getting the other features of the platform functional as soon as possible is highly anticipated.

The future looks bright travelling on this tangent of digitization and many public institutions can take a cue from the Registrar Generals’ Department to go digital with their services.

Written by: Hillary Adongo
Small Business Development Advisor
E: [email protected]
Cell: +233247483235