Ghana Enterprises Agency (GEA) and IE Africa Center (IE University, Spain) have announced a partnership to promote the economic empowerment of women in Ghana by focusing on providing leadership and development training for women entrepreneurs.
Empowering women is one of the most crucial concerns of the Millennium Development Goals of the United Nations. To help address the challenges women face and to help build a resilient economy, the Ghana Enterprises Agency (GEA) which provides business development, advisory and financial support services to entrepreneurs in the MSME sector, has put in a place interventions that specifically target the economic empowerment of women in Ghana.
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GEA recently launched the Women Entrepreneurs Rise (WERise), a platform created to bring successful female leaders and enablers together, for professional networking, skills development, and knowledge sharing. Now GEA is partnering with IE Africa Center, an academic centre belonging to IE University to provide leadership and development training programs.
IE Africa Center has already provided leadership training to GEA’s executive team to equip them with skills that will allow the organization to realize its full potential. This partnership is now being extended to include professional development for women entrepreneurs.
Speaking on the partnership, CEO of the Ghana Enterprises Agency, Mrs Kosi Yankey-Ayeh said “leadership and development are crucial to driving entrepreneurship, so we need to partner with leading global universities such as IE University for institutional growth and development.”
IE Africa Center adopts a systems change approach to entrepreneurship and leadership training, encouraging executives, teams and leaders to address policies, mindsets, or power dynamics that underlie societal issues at stake. IE Africa Center collaborates with and supports strategic institutions such as the GEA with systems change coaching to drive systems change at scale across the continent.
“Ghana is a key country for the IE Africa Center because of their high numbers of women-owned businesses, exceptional political leadership and shared values.” IE Africa Center Director, Begoña Gomez Fernandez explained
IE Africa Center Chair, Felicia Appenteng, said: “The Center’s mission is to shine a light on African solutions to global challenges, as such we’re extremely proud to partner with the Ghana Enterprises Agency, to identify, nurture and support African entrepreneurs as they spark systems change.”
About the Ghana Enterprises Agency
The Ghana Enterprises Agency’s mission is to improve the competitiveness of Micro Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) by facilitating the provision of business development programs and integrated support services. Between 2017 to 2020, GEA has provided various interventions to some 635,890 persons with more than 65% of these beneficiaries being women. The support included business formalization, access to finance, capacity-building on enhancing productivity, and market access among others.
About IE University and IE Africa Center
IE University offers a technology-based learning ecosystem for leaders making a difference in the world through innovation, a global vision, an entrepreneurial mindset and a unique Humanities-based approach. The vision of the Center is to promote an African-centric view of both modernity and the future by partnering with African innovators and their institutions on the continent and across the diaspora, to build academic content and research designed to reshape the world. IE Africa Center collaborates with knowledge experts and thought leaders to bring the African perspective to global conversations on humanities, education and social innovation.
