Mr Lukman Abdul-Rahim, Executive Director, National Board for Small Scale Industries (NBSSI), has appealed to actors in the business sector to formulate innovative policies and programmes that would help address major constraints facing Micro and Small Scale entrepreneurs in the country.

He said the development of micro and small scale enterprises required an integrated approach, which called for actors in the sector to devise various means of tackling and addressing the myriad of constraints facing them.

Mr Abdul-Rahim made the appeal in Tamale on Wednesday at the “Kaisen Forum”, meant to introduce to Micro Scale and Medium Enterprises (MSME) and other stakeholders, the NBSSI/JICA Business Development Services (BDS) Project.

The NBSSI/JICA project is dubbed: “Project for formulating a Strategic Model for Quality/Productivity Improvement through BDS for Medium Scale Enterprises (MSEs) in Ghana”, had successfully been piloted in the Ashanti Region and the aim is to replicate it nationwide.

The one day forum on the theme: “Promoting Product Quality Enterprise Productivity through Kaisen in Ghana” is a government of Ghana initiative, aimed at providing technical support to MSMEs to sustainably improve productivity and quality of their products.

Mr Abdul-Rahim said the project was to develop and strengthen the overall capacity of NBSSI officers in the Ashanti Region to deliver quality business development services (BDS) to MSMEs, which the NBSSI recognised the need for entrepreneurs to engage in various manufacturing and service activity to modernize their operations.

He explained that the project was coming to an end and that the NBSSI was intending to use lessons learnt from the pilot phase to expand activities to cover the whole country and required the assistance of development partners such as JICA, Ghana government and other stakeholders.

He said such initiatives held the key to building and sustaining a strong economy and that NBSSI as the national focal point institution for promoting and development of MSMEs will continue to seek and foster partnerships both locally and internationally to promote growth oriented and competitive MSMEs sector.

Alhaji Limuna Mohammed-Muniru, Northern Regional Minister, in a speech read on his behalf, said government recognised the need and was committed to strategically support the growth and development of MSME sector to help accelerate the realisation of growth, productivity and employment potentials of Ghana’s manufacturing sector.

He expressed worry about the array of challenges such as production capacity, product quality and low level managerial competencies facing the MSMEs, which should be addressed holistically for the positive growth of MSMEs.

Dr Ryoichi Ozawa, a representative of JICA stressed the importance of Japan/Ghana strong ties and assured that Japan would continue to offer the needed assistance to developing countries including Ghana to realise their economic and social growth.

He said the NBSSI/JICA BDS project had implemented the Kaizen through "On the Job Training (OJT)" activities in some enterprises in Ashanti Region, which eleven Business Advisory Committee (BAC) heads and some Japanese experts offered the technical support.