Budgetary support for National Board for Small Scale Industries woefully inadequate – SME group
The Association of Small Scale Industries (ASSI) on Thursday called on the Government to adequately resource the National Board for Small Scale Industries (NBSSI) to execute its basic mandate of facilitating the growth of micro and small scale industries.
It said the Board’s poor resource base has resulted in a potential loss of confidence in it by micro and small scale operators as the Board was too feeble to address the challenges of the sector.
Mr Richmond Tetteh, National President of ASSI, made the call at a press conference in Accra to state the Association’s position on the 2012 Budget and highlight findings from a study on the dwindling support from NBSSI to the small scale sector.
He said due to their concern about the declining support from the Board, ASSI engaged KAB Governance Consult, an Accra-based consultancy firm, to examine the challenges of the Board and made recommendations to the appropriate authorities for redress.
Mr Tetteh said the study revealed that the NBSSI had been relegated to the background due to lack of political will to enforce the enabling legislation on one hand and the establishment of parallel and well funded institutions by various governments even as the Board continued to be seriously under-funded in relative terms.
He said those parallel institutions were made to perform core aspects of the NBSSI’s mandate and also virtually deal with the same target groups.
Mr Tetteh cited the Rural Enterprises Project (REP), modules of the National Youth Employment programme and the more recently, the Local Enterprise and Skills Development (LESDEP) as some of the typical parallel examples of structures that were well resourced and managed as high profile government interventions to deal with unemployment and skills development.
“It is submitted that the low budget of the NBSSI cannot be a problem of the State not having enough funds. Our premise being the fact that the Government in 2011 committed 12 million cedis to the LESDEP. The 2012 Budget has allocated a further GH¢63 million to the same programme.
“The November 8, 2011 edition of the Ghanaian Times also reported that the Government has made a commitment of $63.5 million to the Rural Enterprises Project as part of its $185 million budget for the next eight years. MASLOC has also been allotted GH¢35 million under the 2012 Budget,” he added.
Mr Tetteh therefore called on Cabinet to reconsider the present approach of setting up parallel bodies for the promotion of the micro and small scale enterprises sector without recourse to the mandate of the NBSSI.
“Government should also pay attention to the co-ordination role given the Board by its enabling Act 434, section 4.1 to ensure proper flow of information and avoidance of duplication of efforts and waste of material resources”.
He called on the Ministers of Finance and Economic Planning, Trade and Industry and the Parliamentary Select Committee on Trade and Industry, to ensure that NBSSI was effectively resourced to enable it address the myriad challenges of small scale entrepreneurs.
Mr Kwesi Afriyie Badu, Chief Executive of KAB Governance Consult, said the study had shown empirical evidence and expressed the hope that the authorities would listen to their suggestions.
The NBSSI was set up in 1985 following the passage of an enabling Act in 1981. It merged with the Ghanaian Enterprises Development Commission in 1991 and absorbed the Cottage Industries Division of the Department of Rural Housing and Cottage Industries in 1994.
Source: GNA