I can boldly say that the journey of entrepreneurship is unpredictable; the only factor that makes a difference is an entrepreneur’s commitment to give off their best.
When you find yourself in a competitive business environment with all the challenges you can think of, discipline and patience keep you grounded. They enable you persevere and guide your choices – financial, social, sales. Very often in decision-making, an entrepreneur’s personal choice may conflict with their business choice but discipline helps me choose my business first because it represents a course greater than myself.
To fellow entrepreneurs, keep working diligently at overcoming the many hurdles you face today in your entrepreneurial ventures. What matters is the lessons you pick up from these challenges that shape the businessman or woman you become. Always remember, you can only be a failure if you tell yourself you are.
Thank you, Ghana Climate Innovation Centre for providing me with priceless life and business lessons that I may never derive from a training room.”
The Ghana Climate Innovation Centreis a pioneering business incubator with a unique focus of developing SME ventures and entrepreneurs in Ghana’s ‘green economy’. Our mission is to develop and support an exceptional set of transformational ventures and entrepreneurs who are pioneering adaptive and mitigating solutions for climate change issues in Ghana. We do this with a focus on five key economic sectors (energy efficiency & renewable energy; solar power; climate smart agriculture; domestic waste management; water management and purification), the provision of premium business advisory and business mentoring services, technical support in the development, prototyping and testing of their innovation, as well as financial proof of concept grants to qualifying SMEs within our incubator.
GCIC is funded by a grant from the Governments of Denmark and the Netherlands through the World Bank, and is managed by a consortium led by Ashesi University, and including Ernst and Young, SNV Ghana and the United Nations University. The Consortium offers the perfect mix of experience and excellence in private sector development, climate change, entrepreneurship, education and training, and research and development know-how.
Through our work 1,129 Metric Tonnes of CO2 have been avoided. Over 200,000 households have access to products innovated by our entrepreneurs and 127 direct jobs have been created with 57 of them being women-led. More than $1.4 million has been received in grants by businesses – about $700,000 of which was disbursed through GCIC proof of concept grants.
Watch video of GCIC Cohort 5 Induction and Cohort 3 Graduation below.