Ghana’s entrepreneurship is destructive, unproductive – ACEYE

The CEO of the Africa Centre for Entrepreneurship and Youth Empowerment (ACEYE), Emmanuel Acquah, has criticised government policies and initiatives aimed at supporting startups and businesses, stating they have ultimately hindered rather than helped.

This revelation comes ahead of the launch of the Regional Entrepreneurship Freedom (REF) Index, a comprehensive study examining the ease of doing business across Ghana’s 16 regions.

In an interview on Class 91.3 FM, Wednesday, August 21, 2024, Mr Acquah revealed some businesses surveyed in the research are still struggling to obtain necessary legal documents due to the cumbersome and inflexible bureaucratic processes they must navigate.

“Quite a number of businesses we spoken to, some being in existence for 7 years, 8 years – they are still working on getting certain legal documents and that’s a problem,” he said.

The think tank boss expressed frustration that businesses are required to deal with multiple departments and unnecessary administrative barriers to register, rather than having a simple, one-stop solution at the Registrar General’s Department.

“We are talking about entrepreneurship but nobody is talking about productive entrepreneurship. What we are looking at, in fact, what we are practicing here is destructive entrepreneurship and unproductive entrepreneurship. Government says it has created ABCD jobs and in some cases they count the jobs created out of the bureaucracies but in actual fact, very little jobs have been created,” he added.

The 2024 REF index uses standardised global economic indicators to analyse the degree of autonomy, independence, and decentralisation in entrepreneurial decision-making across the 16 regions of Ghana. The report will be launched on August 27, in Accra.

Source:classfmonline.com