The Minister for Gender, Children and Social Protection, Mrs Cynthia Morrison, has urged young women with passion for entrepreneurship to consider starting their ideas from the scratch.
She said the problem of the current generation of young women who want to start their own businesses was to start on a silver platter adding that “people have done catering and yet they were not willing to start something small”.
She was speaking at the launch of the World Bank Group’s report: “Profiting from Parity: Unlocking the Potential of Women’s Businesses in Africa” on Tuesday in Accra.
The sector Minister shared a story of how she started her catering business and later established a school with the little she had at the time.
She said as the nation was pushing the agenda of women and girls, it was important not to neglect the boys who would later grow and become the men in society, adding that it was significant to carry them along.
Mrs Morrison said carrying the boys along would assist in matching the well-trained women in the future with responsible men to make society a better place and thecountry had adopted various strategies to address social protection issues with support from the World Bank and other Development Partners.
The “Profiting from Parity: Unlocking the Potential of Women’s Businesses in Africa” report recommended that large cash grants as part of a business plan competition could help address the capital constraints of growth-oriented firms, including those owned by women.
The report added that removing legal constraints to gender equally and regulatory implementation gaps and that there was the need to offer women-friendly training designs, including peer supports.
It added that there was the need to incentivise women to cross over to male-dominated sectors by sharing information on expected returns in those sectors, and through early exposure in the form of apprenticeship and male role models.
