The Institute for Liberty and Policy Innovation (ILAPI) has suggested to the government to relax the cumbersome business regulations and possibly halve compliances to enable the private sector to take advantage of the 24-hour Economy policy.
In three sectors of the economy—manufacturing, ICT and hospitality—for example, a total of 41 regulators are business operating barriers one must navigate to successfully start their business.
ILAPI said with the manufacturing sector having seventeen regulators, the ICT and hospitality sectors have thirteen and eleven regulators respectively. Aside from these, each of the three sectors must acquire 13, six and 10 business operating certificates respectively to become fully operational.
Through intermediaries, one must pay, at least, GH¢2,000 to facilitate a business entry registration in Ghana, and these barriers, the Ghanaian research group said, are the reasons most businesses fold up.
“Whereas in China and Europe, one can take a week to register their business, start operations, expand and employ more hands to relieve the government of the troubles of unemployment; in Ghana, the transitions are so many and too long that by the time you done, you will have spent a chunk of your principal,” Stephen Dansu, the Senior Research and Policy Analyst of ILAPI, told a section of the media in Tema.
The suggestion by ILAPI to the government on the business environment in Ghana followed two-year research it conducted after a 2022 World Bank’s report that 850,000 Ghanaians are in the poverty bracket.
To ILAPI, the findings it gathered further stifle small and medium enterprises to expand to employ additional workers to reduce the unemployment challenge in the country.
ILAPI argued that none of government’s social intervention programmes remove beneficiaries from poverty, saying, “The success of a social intervention is when beneficiaries exit; but in Ghana, the reverse is the case because the environment is not business friendly to allow more people to smoothly start businesses to employ the people under the poverty line.”
Lauding the government’s 24-hour Economy policy as one that can unlock the unemployment headache of Ghana, ILAPI suggested to the government to reduce the regulation effects and halve the transition bureaucracies from 10 to five years, exempt some of the regulations, deploy a unified digital registration platform to intermediaries’ interference and streamline processes to minimise institutional overlaps.
Further recommending that websites should be effective and informative, the number of years for renewal of business certificates be increased from one year to two years and reducing the number of certificates, ILAPI wondered why regulatory bodies would go about locking up businesses for non-compliance instead of encouraging businesses to pay their bills in instalment to keep their businesses running.
“When you lock up a business for non-compliance, not only are you punishing the operator but also adding to the already biting unemployment numbers government claims its addressing,” Peter Bismark Kwofie, the executive director for the research policy advocacy group, argued.
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