- AGI Tells Women Entrepreneurs to Turn Networks and Digital Skills into Engines of Business Growth
The Association of Ghana Industries is urging women entrepreneurs to treat professional networks, digital literacy, mentorship and business training as core productive assets rather than optional additions to running a business.
The intervention reflects a growing recognition that Ghana’s industrialisation challenge is not simply about expanding access to finance, but also about helping small enterprises convert knowledge, technology and relationships into sustainable commercial growth.
For women-led businesses, the question is increasingly whether skills can be translated into higher productivity, stronger market access and firms capable of creating jobs.
Seth Twum-Akwaboah, Chief Executive Officer of the AGI, made the call during a special Women in Business Session at the 2026 Ghana Industrial Summit and Exhibition in Accra, held under the theme “Innovating for Growth: Women Driving Ghana’s Economic Transformation.”
“Networking in business provides access to information, knowledge, partnerships and opportunities that will contribute to the growth of their businesses,” he said.
His argument places business relationships alongside capital and technical skills as a factor determining whether micro and small enterprises can scale.
The economic case for stronger networks is increasingly supported by evidence. Research involving 1,771 women entrepreneurs in Ghana found that participation in online business networking groups improved innovation and business practices and increased profits by about 26.00%–27.00%, even though monthly sales did not rise.
The finding suggests that better information, management practices and peer connections can improve profitability even before businesses achieve substantial revenue expansion.
Joyce Ababio, founder of the Joyce Ababio College of Creative Design and Chairperson of Women in Business, argued that the next challenge is connecting training to actual commercial outcomes.
She urged entrepreneurs and policymakers to build stronger links between skills development, production, finance, technology and markets. Her intervention reflects a persistent weakness in enterprise-development programmes: technical training alone does not guarantee that a business will secure customers, finance expansion or reach new markets.
That gap is particularly significant for women-owned businesses, which constitute a large share of Ghana’s small-enterprise economy but continue to face financing and market constraints.
The International Trade Centre’s SheTrades initiative estimates that women own about 44.00% of small businesses in Ghana, while highlighting difficulties including collateral requirements, loan processes and digital literacy. The challenge is therefore less about increasing entrepreneurial participation than improving the productivity and scalability of businesses that already exist.
The AGI is also working with the Microfinance and Small Loans Centre to provide bookkeeping training to members in Tamale, Sunyani, Kumasi and Takoradi.
The initiative targets an important but often overlooked barrier to finance: many smaller businesses lack the financial records needed to demonstrate revenue, profitability and repayment capacity to formal lenders.
Proper bookkeeping can also help entrepreneurs separate household spending from business cash flow and identify which products or activities are generating returns.
Vivian Owusu Asante, speaking on behalf of MASLOC Chief Executive Abigail Elorm Akwambea Mensah, said the institution remained committed to supporting women unable to satisfy the requirements of mainstream financial institutions.
MASLOC could support entrepreneurs at smaller scales and help them gradually formalise their businesses as they develop stronger operating structures, she said. That approach treats formalisation as a progression rather than a single administrative event, allowing enterprises to build records, markets and financial credibility over time.
Digital capacity is becoming another increasingly important component of that transition. Deputy Trade and Industry Minister Sampson Ahi told the summit that reliable power and properly deployed digital tools would be critical to determining Ghana’s next phase of industrial development.
“Digital tools properly deployed, convert local production into continental reach,” he said, linking digitalisation directly to the ability of Ghanaian businesses to move beyond local markets.
For women entrepreneurs, digital literacy now extends far beyond maintaining a social-media presence. It increasingly includes electronic payments, online marketing, e-commerce, accounting software, customer-management systems, data analysis and artificial intelligence tools that can help small firms manage operations and reach consumers more efficiently.
Ghana already has significant digital-payment infrastructure, but the commercial challenge is ensuring small businesses can convert that infrastructure into sales, financing opportunities and wider market access.
AGI’s agenda also extends to labour-market connectivity. The association plans to launch a job-matching platform developed by Ubuntu Technologies, supported by the Mastercard Foundation and implemented in collaboration with the Ministry of Youth.
Mr Twum-Akwaboah said the platform is expected to contain information on about 10,000 companies, helping businesses identify talent while connecting job seekers to vacancies.
The initiative could become more important as women-owned enterprises move beyond the owner-manager model and begin requiring specialised technical, administrative and managerial skills.
Small firms often face high search costs when recruiting staff, particularly outside established corporate networks, and digital matching could reduce some of those frictions.
But employment platforms will ultimately generate value only if participating businesses themselves are expanding strongly enough to create sustainable jobs.
Finance nonetheless remains unavoidable. Government has allocated GH¢401mn in the 2026 national budget towards establishing and operationalising the Ghana Women’s Development Bank, aimed specifically at addressing financing constraints confronting women-owned businesses.
The larger challenge will be ensuring that new capital is combined with the financial records, managerial skills and market opportunities required to turn borrowing into productive investment rather than simply expand access to debt.
That is why the AGI’s argument goes beyond another call for credit. An entrepreneur with financing but no market can struggle to generate sufficient sales, while one with training but no working capital may be unable to apply newly acquired skills; similarly, a business with a good product but weak records can remain excluded from formal finance.
Ghana’s enterprise-development challenge is therefore to connect capital, skills, digital capability, financial discipline and market access rather than treating each as a separate policy problem.
For Ghana’s industrialisation agenda, the potential payoff is substantial because the country already has a large base of women engaged in business. The next phase is to help more of those enterprises move from subsistence and micro-scale activity towards productive firms capable of hiring workers, adopting technology, exporting and reinvesting profits.
As Joyce Ababio put it, the critical task is connecting training to “production, finance, technology and markets” a chain that may determine whether women-led enterprises become a much larger force in Ghana’s manufacturing, services and employment landscape.
