The Accra campus of the China Europe International Business School (CEIBS) at East Legon is expected to be a beehive of activity this mid-week as scores of business women have signed up for the “GAOFI/CEIBS Business Women’s Summit 2017.”
There are six astute business people billed to speak on various sub-themes. They include Ghanaian speakers Mrs Grace Amy-Obeng, CEO of the FC Group; Professor Mathew Tsamenyi, Executive Director of CEIBS, and Madam Aba Amissah Quainoo, Executive Director and Chief Consultant of Mel Consult.
“At the conference, I will be talking about the value of business development services for business growth,” Madam Amissah Quainoo told Business Day in a pre-summit interview.
According to her, Mel Consulting Limited is supporting the conference with a business accelerator called E-change, which stands for Creative Change.
So, the E-change accelerator is going to have a presence there to encourage people to register their businesses into the accelerator.
“We will facilitate access to credit for different kinds of businesses that register at the conference,” she indicated.
In a separate interview, Professor Mathew Tsamenyi said he would be speaking on “value creation through management of working capital.”
He said “I’ve been involved in women entrepreneurship for the past couple of years.”
And so, his task is to meet these women, who would probably be making submissions on challenges they are facing and expecting solutions, and understand their issues and offer practicalideas for resolving these challenges.
But he is too aware that mostly people will list their number one challenge as finance. “I totally understand that to some extent, especially if you look at the fact that the interest rates are so high but then the question that we want to ask is: with the limited resources that we have can we maybe take advantage of opportunities and manage and start to create value?
“So, that’s what I will be discussing during the programme.
“And, my hope is that I work with them to actually identify some of the challenges they have individually and probably even collectively and also to create some sort of a network where we’ll continue some sort of discussion after the programme to see how we can actually work with them to improve their business – the bottom line,” he stressed.
But he wants patrons to be assured that they will be in the company of people who are on top of the subject area. “So, one of the things we’ve done, and that is one of the things I am excited about, is to champion women entrepreneurship and we’ve been doing that since 2012 as an institution.
“Our (CEIBS) concept and motivation is basically to see how these women grow their businesses.”
