Participants with the certificates and officials of partnering organisations
Zenith Bank Ghana in partnership with the World Trade Centre, Accra and Alibaba.com has organised a Masterclass session for Small and Medium Scale Enterprises (SMEs) on how to grow their businesses online.
The ‘Alibaba Global Seller Training E-Course Masterclass’, had experts from Alibaba taking the participants through the needed resources to launch their businesses on Alibaba.com- China’s biggest e-commerce platform.
It also aims to expose local sellers to the global market and highlight to business owners, the advantages of signing on to the Alibabab.com platform and coach and guide sellers to meet the challenges that come with export trading.
Divisional Head, Marketing, Zenith Bank, Kwame Adadey, said the bank has over the years been working with various organisations to help in the funding and financing of SMEs.
“So what we are hoping to do is that in collaboration with those agencies, we can help the SMEs … also train them in terms of the technical specifications of the product that they need and once they able to get all these things working in harmony, they can actually scale-up to meet the global market demands and expectations,” he said.
Mr. Adadey said one major challenge SMEs face was poor book keeping which limits their access to funding from the banks.
“One of the major challenges is the information they are able to feed banks, because before you give out a facility, you want to have some historical data, how well they have been selling how well their books have been kept, whether they have borrowed from other entities and how well they are performing profitably. And so if they are able to get that financial aspect well in terms of keeping records it actually helps us give them more funds,” he said.
He thus noted that the bank has been organizing training for SMEs in financial management to help them keep their books better.
Deputy Director Services Manufactures and Petrochemicals at the Ghana Export Promotion Authority (GEPA), Banda Khalifa, said for SMEs to have a strong online presence they have to streamline certain activities.
“You should have a good packaging and branding and at GEPA we have consistently tried to assist SMEs when it comes to packaging and labeling.
When it comes to brand presence, we try as much as possible to assist them to be able to take advantage of our services,” he said.
Executive Director World Trade Center, Edem Yevutsey said the training programme is designed to impart new sellers with the basic knowledge needed to sell on the Alibaba.com platform.
“Provide sellers with in-depth insight on the global market as well as teach sellers how they can position themselves to maximize profits on the global market,” he said.
By Jamila Akweley Okertchiri