In the last quarter, the Ghana Climate Innovation Centre (GCIC) conducted an Environmental and Social Safeguards (ESS) Assessment on all 18 businesses in GCIC’s business incubator and accelerator programme. The objective of the assessment was to identify the possibility of adverse environmental and social impacts emanating from the individual business operations to offer viable solutions. 

Through the development and management of GCIC’s environmental and social safeguards, we supported enterprises to deploy all the necessary national and best practice protocols in the operation and management of their enterprises. The financial and technical support GCIC offers to businesses in the cohort are targeted at driving sustainable scalability and the growth of enterprises, while ensuring that pollution and other detrimental impacts on the environment and people and reduced. These safeguards are measures taken by governments, companies, organisations, or communities to assess and afterwards prevent a potential risk or impact which can adversely affect the environment.

As a first step in the ESS process, an environmental and social screening is conducted at the various operational sites of GCIC’s enterprises for the identification of any potential environmental and social impacts. This enables us to recommend mitigation measures for redress. Additionally, these enterprises are given the necessary guidance for the implementation of required protocols for sustainability.