Section of the participants
MTN Ghana has equipped about 200 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the Greater Accra Region with digital solutions to accelerate their growth.
The initiative was held under the MTN SME Business Clinic as part of the Greater Accra Review and aimed at providing SMEs with practical tools to scale up their operations.
Speaking at the event, themed “Developing an Effective Marketing Strategy for Domestic and Global Business Advantage,” the Senior Manager for SME Sales, Partnerships and Business Broadband at MTN Ghana, Abubakar Sadiq Mohammed, said many SMEs were stuck in survival mode because they had not adopted digital transformation.
“Majority of them are doing very great work. However, because they are not adopting digital tools, it is making their businesses move sluggishly,” he said.
He explained that MTN’s YellowBiz suite offered SMEs stable internet connectivity and the ability to create business websites to access the global market.
The suite also includes Microsoft 365 with Teams, which enables productivity and collaboration from different locations.
Mr. Mohammed said statistics showed that more than 51 percent of SMEs were championed by women.
He said the package offered affordable voice and data services, as well as additional benefits such as doctor-on-call services and insurance cover.
On financing, Mr. Mohammed said MTN was partnering with banks under its SME Accelerate programme and offering MoMo loans to address funding gaps.
He said MTN had so far trained more than 1,400 SMEs this year.
“This is the sixth clinic in 2026 after four last year, with previous editions held in the Volta, Western, and Northern regions,” he said.
The programme is being implemented in partnership with SMEGA, which tracks the impact of the interventions to ensure that businesses transition from survival to growth.
The Co-Founder of SMEGA (Small and Medium Enterprises Ghana Awards), Richard Norgah, said the major challenges facing SMEs went beyond access to finance.
According to him, although financing had long been considered the main constraint facing SMEs, research conducted by SMEGA showed that the challenges were broader.
“We have believed so far that it is financing, but doing our own research, we realised that it wasn’t financing. It’s beyond financing. It has been the way they manage their products, the way they package it, and also client management,” he said.
He said SMEGA had partnered with MTN to address those gaps through training focused on product improvement and client management.
Mr Norgah also disclosed that SMEGA had an e-commerce platform that allowed businesses to sell their products to customers in a manner similar to platforms such as Alibaba and Amazon.
By Prince Fiifi Yorke