Accra, Ghana//-MTN Ghana in partnership with Charter House and Geisha Soap has once again reaffirmed its commitment to women’s empowerment as it sponsored the 2025 National Women’s Summit & Expo which attracted more than 500 females.
The event which attracted women and girls from diverse groups was held on Friday, March 7 at the Accra International Conference Centre.
At a panel discussion titled’ Overcoming Barriers To Growth Of Women In Business & MSMEs, ‘ the Chief Enterprise Business Officer of MTN Ghana, Madam Angela Mensah-Poku, underscored the importance of the telecom giant’s zeal and commitment to supporting women entrepreneurs, especially those in the micro, small, and medium-sized enterprise (MSME) sector.
According to her, economic parity could not be achieved without empowering women, particularly in the country’s informal sector, which is significantly dominated by female-led businesses.
Madam Mensah-Poku announced that in their bid to close the wide business gap, MTN Ghana would soon launch a new digital product designed specifically for women entrepreneurs across the country.
In her own words: “We’ll be launching a new product in the next few weeks that seeks to support women on their digital journey, give them access to markets, give them access to mentorship and capability training, as well as exciting products and services from MTN business”.
She continued: “We thought, what better place to come and outdoor this than the summit today, and with International Women’s Day being tomorrow, we said that now is the time. We believe that accelerating for action is one of the calls to duty, and we’re excited to be part of this summit.”
Madam Mensah-Poku acknowledged that one of the biggest barriers to growth for women in business is limited access to capital.
Many women-led SMEs struggle to secure funding due to the informal nature of their businesses and lack of required financial documentation, among other myriad challenges, she added.
MTN Ghana, Madam Poku-Mensah stated is working closely with banks, SME Ghana, and Nova to provide training in areas such as bookkeeping, marketing, and tax compliance to address the canker.
She was quick to add that the leading telecom company is exploring innovative financial solutions that leverage mobile money transactions as an alternative credit assessment tool to support businesses in that bracket.
“For example, if you’re a Mobile Money (MoMo) user, a merchant user, can you use those statements to go and get a bank loan? Can you use some of our technology that looks at how we predict if you pay your loans back?
“If you’ve taken SOS credit, and you pay it back every two days, we have technology and algorithms that can see this”.
MTN Ghana’s strategy also involves collaborating with banks, insurance companies, and the MTN Foundation to offer comprehensive support to women-led SMEs, the Chief Enterprise Business Officer said.
MTN Ghana believes that by equipping women with the right resources, the ripple effect she noted would extend to entire communities, enhancing national economic growth in the country.
“That for us, is a priority, and will continue to be a priority from now till when. So that’s the reason why we’re focusing on it, as well as that, we’re focusing on women in particular”.
On her part, Deloris Frimpong Manso, popularly known as “Delay”, an entrepreneur and media personality urged the youth to be hungry for success by venturing into setting up businesses to create opportunities for all.
