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By Albert Futukpor
Tamale, July 28, GNA – The Business Development Model promoted under the Empowerment for Life (E4L) Programme has resulted in increased profits for group businesses in rural communities as some of them now make about GHC150,000.00 profit a year.
The 11 group businesses, with between 20 to 30 membership each operating in agricultural commodity value chain in rural communities in the Savelugu, Karaga, Mion, Saboba and Kumbungu Districts of the Northern Region, have also increased their production and customer base.
Mr Abdallah Mohammed, Technical Advisor in-charge of Food Security, Livelihoods and Climate Change at E4L Programme of the Changing Lives in Innovative Partnerships, announced this at a workshop in Tamale to disseminate the E4L Programme’s business model and business cases to relevant stakeholders and duty-bearers.
The workshop was further to receive input from the relevant stakeholders and duty-bearers on how to enhance the E4L Programme’s business development model and improve on it to serve more rural businesses at the community level.
The E4L Programme, being implemented by the Changing Lives in Innovative Partnerships, a subsidiary of the Ghana Developing Communities Association, an NGO, in 2019 developed a business development model that identifies and improves the capacities of farmer and women groups with potential business cases to become commercially viable.
Since 2019, 11 group business cases in the five districts (Savelugu, Karaga, Mion, Saboba and Kumbungu) benefited from the initiative with the E4L Programme documenting some valuable learnings to share, hence the dissemination workshop, which was attended by representatives of the beneficiary businesses, and public institutions, among others.
Mr Mohammed said the beneficiary group businesses “Now have in place business plans, which they use to engage financial institutions and other relevant stakeholders for funding. They now have stronger leadership at the group level and now keep records of their transactions among others.”
He added that “At the moment, we have 11 groups in the incubator that we have worked with within the period of four years, but we still have the intention of enrolling more groups.”
He explained the E4L Programme’s business development model and said it was a four-step model that focused on how to make group businesses more competitive and also profitable at the rural community level.
He said, “The first part is identifying the businesses. As part of the identification, once we identify the business, we then do fact-finding to know more about their costs and revenue structures to enable us to do a test of profitability to know whether the business has the potential of making profits or not. Once the business has that potential, then the business is enrolled into an incubator programme where it is supported with a number of capacity building like financial management and record keeping, branding and marketing, as well as supported to develop competitive business plans that can be used to engage financial institutions and other donors to get funds to expand.”
He added that “The third step has to do with release of funds for implementation and the last step is monitoring and also providing mentoring and coaching support so that they will be able to maximise profit at the group business level.”
Mr Mohammed said “We learn a number of lessons. One key lesson is that there are a lot of untapped business opportunities within the agricultural commodity value chain in the north and group business also has the potential of being supported to become a competitive business.”
He added that “Another is that Village Savings and Loans Associations continue to be the backbone of the businesses at the community level, and we also realise that a lot of farmers and also women have limited capacity on marketing, making them not to be able to fully utilise the viability and also commercialising their businesses.”
He appealed to government through the Ghana Enterprises Agency to support group businesses with funding to make them competitive to enable them commercialise their operations to even employ others.
He said, “If you look at most of government’s support and policies; they have concentrated a lot on individual entrepreneurs, but from what we have done, we realise government can also support group businesses. The support should mainly be in the form of funding because we realise that once the business potential is there, but they do not have funds to work with, at the end of the day, they do not really get the full potential out of it.”
Mr Abdul Rahman Abukari, Financial Secretary of Tungteiya Shea Butter Processing Cooperative from Kumbungu District, a beneficiary group, said, “We benefit a lot from the training that we received under the E4L Programme. The value addition aspect is also paramount. We used to do the raw shea butter and supply but now we process it into soap, pomade amongst other products. It has increased our profits more than before. We have also attracted a lot of customers leading to increased production.”
GNA
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