A social development agency, SME Grow Africa (SMEGA), in partnership with the Cape Coast Technical University (CCTU), has launched a business incubation project and centre to train, coach and mentor interested students and alumni of the school to develop and own their businesses.
Known as ‘Incubate2Enterprise’, the programme seeks to provide budding and aspiring entrepreneurs with the right environment and to aid them with material and technical human resources for nurturing their ideas into viable ventures.
In a bid to encourage partnerships and eliminate the culture of individualism in business, prospective beneficiaries of the initiative would be expected to work in groups of between three to five after successfully going through established procedures, which included pitching ideas.
The CCTU and SMEGA signed a Memorandum of Understanding to formalise the partnership at the launch of the project on the campus of the institution in Cape Coast.
The agreement was signed on behalf of the school by its Vice-Chancellor, Rt. Rev. Ing. Professor Joshua Danso Owusu Sekeyere while Mr Kwesi Ofori Junior, the Chief Executive Officer of SMEGA signed for his company.
Mr Ofori Junior explained that the project would be rolled out in phases to enable the prospective businesses to go through a thorough process of development.
He indicated that even though it was not limited to the students and alumni of CCTU, the school was the company’s priority and added that they were prepared to support as many people as were ready to partake in the project.
“The most important thing is that the embodiment of the group must have some viable project to want to execute. Our approach is to help the entire university community to churn out very viable businesses and very good entrepreneurs in the future to take our economic growth to another level,” he stated.
Mr Ofori Junior was of the view that entrepreneurship was crucial for job creation and economic growth so ‘Incubate2Enterprise’ would change the mindset of students to steer their future through job creation on and off-campus.
For his part, Rev Prof Owusu Sekyere, while touting CCTU as an entrepreneurial university, expressed the hope that the project would give students with business ideas the opportunity to have them polished and nurtured.
He said entrepreneurship was the surest way to achieve absolute economic freedom and societal transformation, especially through job creation.
“If you want to be rich in this country, you cannot go and work for anybody. It is better to set up your business. The richest people in Ghana and in the world all over are people who have had very good ideas, nurtured those ideas and have brought them to reality. Those who have good ideas and act on them are those that rule the world,’ he said.
The Vice-Chancellor further encouraged the university community to take full advantage of the initiative to develop themselves to come out as successful business people.
“We are thankful to SME Africa for the partnership. We are happy with this initiative and we are looking forward to it blossoming into a huge thing in the not-too-distant future,” he added.
Dr Joe Techie, the Board Chair of SMEGA, urged students to be highly entrepreneurial, creative and innovative and was optimistic that the partnership would energise students to establish their enterprises.
He said the concept of entrepreneurial mindset was to democratise wealth creation and that it was never too late to be an entrepreneur.
“So far as you can come up with a viable idea that is attractive and anchored on the goods and services anybody wants, you will achieve the wallet test by moving money from people’s wallets into your wallet as they patronise your service,” he said.
Source: Ghana News Agency
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