Mr Joe Jackson, Chief Executive Officer of Dalex Finance, has described the current approach to financing Small and Medium-Scale Enterprises (SMEs) in Ghana as “economic charity” rather than a deliberate strategy for sustainable growth.
He made the remarks at a public engagement organised by the Chartered Institute of Marketing Ghana (CIMG), dubbed “Evening with Joe Jackson,” which was held on the theme: “Ananse Stories About the Ghanaian Economy.”
Mr Jackson argued that the long-standing narrative that SME funding alone could drive Ghana’s economic transformation was misleading and needed urgent re-examination.
According to him, although SMEs remain a significant part of the country’s economic structure, many of them continue to operate informally, face low productivity levels, and struggle to scale into sustainable enterprises.
He said the situation had resulted in repeated SME initiatives that had failed to translate into meaningful productivity gains or long-term growth.
“SME funding in its current form is economic charity, not a growth strategy. We have had more than 60 different SME initiatives launched within the last decade, yet productivity remains low, firms remain informal, and many of them collapse within three years,” he stated.
Mr Jackson noted that if the continuous launch of SME programmes automatically resulted in growth, Ghana would by now have become one of the strongest economies globally.
He explained that the country’s real challenge was not the absence of small businesses, but the failure to develop a few highly productive and competitive local firms capable of driving industrial growth.
According to him, Ghana had not succeeded in nurturing strong domestic companies that could anchor industrialisation, dominate regional markets, or retain value created from local resources.
Mr Jackson therefore called for a shift from broad SME interventions to a more targeted model that focuses on supporting high-performing domestic firms with proven capacity to grow.
He said countries such as Singapore, Malaysia and South Korea achieved sustained growth by deliberately supporting strategic companies rather than spreading limited resources across thousands of small businesses.
“Not all SMEs will grow. Some are simply fighting for survival. Growth comes from exceptional firms, not from scattering support to everyone. We must select champions regardless of politics,” he added.
Mr Jackson also linked the absence of strong domestic companies to Ghana’s persistent currency challenges, capital leakages and the dominance of foreign firms in key sectors of the economy.
He cautioned that as long as capital ownership and decision-making remained largely external, profits would continue to be repatriated, leaving Ghana as a tenant in its own economy.
Mr Jackson urged policymakers to review pension fund regulations to allow more long-term domestic capital to be channelled into productive Ghanaian firms instead of concentrating investments mainly in government securities.
On the broader economy, he warned that excessive dependence on external capital, limited value addition in the extractive sector, and weak enforcement of local content policies continued to undermine Ghana’s economic sovereignty.
