I will disagree with anyone who will say that the Ghanaian is lazy. The average person in Ghana is not lazy considering the hard work people undertake to earn their survival. The various micro enterprises started and managed by many people is a demonstration that majority of the people in the informal sector are working hard to reduce their own “level of poverty”. Unfortunately many of these people inspite of their hard work have not been able to either grow their enterprises as expected. Some have managed the same size of business over the years.
The question is; what is keeping the hardworking man on the street hawking and hawking without graduating into a different business? What is keeping the koko(porridge), waakye (rice mixed with beans), roasted plantain seller, etc from transforming their small joint into a micro then to small and then becoming a medium enterprise? Analysing these issues overtime it is clear to me that hard work and access to credits are not the only ingredients needed for enterprise development or wealth creation.
The capacity of the micro entrepreneur including the hawker comes to play. Many of our entrepreneurs work with their raw skills. There is little or no adoption of tools and systems that can enable them to innovate well. Innovation can be capital intensive but simple ways of finding out how something can be done better may not need much money.
Why should the koko seller still fetch koko from the bowl of koko with a cup? Can’t there be a better and healthy way to do this?
The question is; what is keeping the hardworking man on the street hawking and hawking without graduating into a different business? What is keeping the koko(porridge), waakye (rice mixed with beans), roasted plantain seller, etc from transforming their small joint into a micro then to small and then becoming a medium enterprise? Analysing these issues overtime it is clear to me that hard work and access to credits are not the only ingredients needed for enterprise development or wealth creation.
The capacity of the micro entrepreneur including the hawker comes to play. Many of our entrepreneurs work with their raw skills. There is little or no adoption of tools and systems that can enable them to innovate well. Innovation can be capital intensive but simple ways of finding out how something can be done better may not need much money.
Why should the koko seller still fetch koko from the bowl of koko with a cup? Can’t there be a better and healthy way to do this?
Why should the plantain seller subject herself to serious health hazard to provide for her household without a better way of doing her business?
Why should the farmer still struggle just to keep a 1 acre farm? Many of such questions can be asked but how do we help solve these challenges.
- Business innovators must not only focus on developing strategies for the bigger businesses. There is need for more “thinkers” who can create creative systems that can help micro- enterprises to function better and more effectively.
- Financial institutions must not only sell credits and saving products they must be enterprise transformers.
- Government must not just be involved in supplying credit to the poor they must help finance tools and structures that can enable small businesses to work effectively and efficiently.
No comments:
Post a Comment