Business innovation hub, Tentmaker Ghana, has partnered with the West Africa Art Unit of British Council to bring its Creative Enterprise Program (CEP) to 21 Fashion entrepreneurs in Accra.

The three weeks training, mentorship and networking workshop was facilitated by NESTA, a Global Innovation Foundation base in the UK that has brought innovation to many brands across the globe over the years.

Participants were taken through three days of intensive Enterprise training to model their brand for sustainability and to compete on the global stage.

Globally, entrepreneurs’ major challenge in building sustainable businesses occurs within the first five years.

It is evident that without nurturing businesses with strong systems, processes and models, the business will not grow. This early business challenge that stifle growth is more predominant in Africa.

Most businesses in Africa are not able to compete on the global market and mostly do not grow beyond the entrepreneurs who set up the business.

Hence, applicants were taken through the practicalities of branding, marketing and financial management during the two weeks of mentoring and networking sessions.



The workshop gave the participants the opportunity to model and review their Missions, Visions, Customers, analyzed the SWOT and BOLD of their business and also had the opportunity to pitch their ideas.

This Creative Enterprise Program (CEP) is a British Council West Africa Art Program to support creative hubs enhance the capacity of the creative community to develop systems, including financial management to position their brand to leverage the opportunities in the sector.

The workshop dubbed Cap2SCale (Capacity to Scale) is part of Tentmaker Ghana’s Community program to build local brands into globally sustainable brands.



CEO of Tentmaker Ghana, Henry Agyei Asare explained that most entrepreneurs, especially in the creative and in particular the fashion industry in Ghana do not run their Enterprise as business that is seeking to compete on the global fashion market.

According to Henry, who is passionate about creating models for developing local economies, most of these enterprises are operated more as a hobby than a business.



“There is a difference between a great Idea and a great business idea, a great idea has the entrepreneur as focus but a great business idea has the customer as the focus. Until you ascertain the demand that customers are compelled to pay for and that which will continue to exist and model systems and procedures that can sustain the brand beyond you as an entrepreneur, you are only engaging in what I call hobby fantasy, the brand wouldn’t go far.” He added.

Tentmaker Ghana, this year, has engaged in similar local economic development training and workshops such as RaptorKids where kids from ages 10 to 15 are trained in Coding, App development and Game development as well as the NEIP Business support program where over 90 entrepreneurs were trained with the capacity to model sustainable brands.