On June 26, 2021, the 22nd annual Vodafone Ghana Music Awards (VGMAs) crowned Diana Hamilton Artist of the Year. This honor makes her the first female gospel singer to ever win the trophy and comes on the heels of year-long praise for her song “Adom,” which also won Gospel Song of the Year. While Vodafone Ghana sponsors the VGMAs to support the celebration of Ghanaian musicians like Hamilton, the company also recently partnered with Invest in Africa to aid local Ghanaian businesses and ignite growth in Ghana’s economy.

A Promising Partnership

Created in 2012, Invest in Africa (IIA) operates in five African nations: Ghana, Kenya, Senegal, Zambia and Mauritania. According to Carol Annang, IIA’s Ghana country director, IIA strives to create jobs and attract investment opportunities for local businesses. By uniting small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with large corporations, Annang says that these types of partnerships can help corporations “use their local buying power as a force for good.”

Since Vodafone Ghana has expressed its dedication to Ghana’s economic and social growth, the partnership with the IIA gives Vodafone Ghana the opportunity to utilize its resources in accordance with the company’s mission. Additionally, because Vodafone Ghana has served small businesses for years, the company can provide IIA with additional experience in “network-based IT and communication solutions.”

Specific Solutions

The IIA and Vodafone Ghana will focus on two solutions to propel the growth of Ghanaian local businesses:

1. Red Trader: This mobile application and web portal assists traders in overseeing their inventory. Additionally, the application features tools that allow traders to track and collect payments.
2. Your Business Online: This proposal helps SMEs expand their businesses online with the assistance of Vodafone Ghana’s team. The company’s experts help businesses create an online presence through professional site designs, “e-commerce integration and social media marketing.”

Through these measures, IIA and Vodafone Ghana hope to expand the digital presence of local Ghanaian businesses and boost the economic growth of these businesses. These solutions are set to begin implementation on April 1 for at least two years.

COVID-19 Setbacks and Steps Forward

As Ghana continues to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, this plan for Ghanaian business growth comes at an opportune time. While coronavirus infections rose throughout the country and businesses permanently closed, by the third quarter of 2020, Ghana entered a recession for the first time since 1982. Additionally, Ghana’s GDP grew only 1.1% in 2020 compared to a growth of 6.5% before the pandemic began.

Because of this low GDP increase and Ghana’s high population growth, the real per capita income of Ghana was “1% lower [in 2020] than in 2019.” Moreover, according to the World Bank Group, additional impacts of the pandemic will include decreases in “foreign direct investment and tourism receipts.” Consequently, many families in Ghana have become impoverished and the country’s poverty rate has increased since the start of the pandemic.

However, one of the principal objectives of the collaboration between IIA and Vodafone Ghana is to help businesses recover from COVID-19 setbacks. In fact, William Pollen, the CEO of IIA, expressed how necessary it is to support SMEs because these enterprises employ the majority of people living in sub-Saharan Africa and constitute roughly 80% of business activity in the region.

The Road Ahead

On the whole, despite the past year’s struggles and the hurdles that arise on the road to economic recovery, the partnership between IIA and Vodafone Ghana presents a positive outlook for the future of local Ghanaian businesses. In the words of Tawa Bolarin, the director of Vodafone Business, “these are indeed exciting times for us and the entrepreneurial community in Ghana.”

– Madeline Murphy
Photo: Flickr