The Enhancing Growth in New Enterprises (ENGINE) Programme in conjunction with the Ghana Stock Exchange (GSE) has organised a day’s Investment Dialogue Session for Entrepreneurs under the theme “Raising Capital on the Ghana Alternative Market” in Tamale. The session was co-funded by the African Development Bank through the Ministry of Finance under the Ghana Institutional Support Project (GISP) and UKAid through the Department for International Development (DFID) funded programme, ENGINE.
The session which witnessed over 170 participants provided opportunities to promising entrepreneurs identified through the ENGINE programme to seek alternative sources of funding for their businesses. The session helped entrepreneurs to deepen their awareness of equity financing through listing on the Ghana Alternative Market.
In his opening remarks on behalf of the Programme Director of ENGINE, Francis Opoku-Mensah, Enterprise Finance Manager advised entrepreneurs to take advantage of this new emerging funding opportunity from the GAX to secure long term capital to scale up their businesses. This will help address investment gaps that SMEs in Ghana are confronted with as a result of high cost of capital and lack of long term funds available for investments by the financial institutions.
On his part, the Deputy Managing Director of GSE, Ekow Afedzie indicated that the GSE has created an Alternative Market mainly to target and facilitate the listing of SMEs onto the Stock Market. It is therefore a good platform for promising SMEs thinking of having medium to long term funds to start considering the Ghana Alternative Market as the platform to secure such capital for their businesses.
He further stressed that the session was organised mainly to clarify the issues relating to listing on the GAX and how the GAX can help to provide a relatively cheaper source of funds to entrepreneurs seeking capital which cannot be provided by traditional financial institutions in Ghana.
