After the call for application in December 2017, the National Entrepreneurship and Innovation Plan (NEIP) has provided a structured Entrepreneurship and Business Development Training for all the 7000 applicants of the NEIP Business Support programme to the hubs.

Though only 500 applicants would be considered in the end, the Chief Executive Officer of NEIP, John Kumah said they are of the belief that even if the businesses do not get the seed capital funding, they should be able to get business support services in areas of capacity building, marketing, branding and other management skills.

Speaking under the theme, “Partnering the Hubs to Provide Business Support for Accelerated Job Creation,” he noted that NEIP partnered British Council to develop the standardized training module and the standard criteria that would be used to select the final beneficiaries of the NEIP Business Support Programme for this phase of the project.

Mr Kumah added that averagely, each hub will have about 140 applicants to work with within a period of one month. As part of the training process, the hubs are mandated to study and know the businesses very well in terms of their value proposition, product or service innovation, business location and their financial performance in terms of sales and many more.

He indicated that the hubs will have the opportunity to select the best 10 of the businesses that will come into their centre for training and selection. These 10 businesses would be selected and details of these businesses submitted to the head office of NEIP.

According to him, NEIP would do due diligence of the businesses selected through their Regional Monitoring teams which comprises both staff from NEIP and the Ministry of Business Development for the verification of the selected businesses.

The CEO of NEIP noted that a seed capital in the range of GH?10,000 to GH?100,000 interest free loan will be presented to selected final 500 businesses that will be submitted to NEIP after the due diligence.

“The hubs will have a continuous relation with the 10 businesses per hub selected in terms of monitoring their progress, continuous business advisory support and ensure that these 10 businesses under their care repay the interest free loan given to them,” he intimated.

The Director of Business Support, NEIP, Franklin Owusu-Karikari emphasized that the essence of this programme is to drive the entrepreneurship change in Ghana and Government which sees this as a flagship project has allocated US$10million to be used as a supporting seed capital for businesses.

He said the reason being that government wants businesses to grow so that they can employ more people and expand the economy of Ghana. Whiles they do that, government will ensure that these businesses become sustainable in the long run.

“So in fairness, we want to do an open approach to ensure that the best is selected and for that matter we invited private entrepreneurship houses who are within the country to be engaged on the selection process,” he posited.