Our ambition at the Ghana Climate Innovation Centre at Ashesi University is to be a distinguished Centre of Excellence for climate smart entrepreneurship and innovation, steering Ghana’s transition to a low carbon economy through the provision of a robust range of financial, business advisory and support services to enterprises in Ghana’s small and growing business sector.  An element of that work will include climate-smart policy advocacy.

Over the next 5 years we will incubate an additional 100 climate innovators and climate entrepreneurs from the small and growing business sector.  Our ambition is to reach an additional 300,000 Ghanaian households with green consumer goods and services, create 350 new jobs, ensure that households have access to climate-smart energy, water, and natural resource solutions, and generate cumulative revenues of over $4m from the goods and services of our entrepreneurs.  This is our aspiration.

Incubating Innovation is the Ghana Climate Innovation Centre’s annual thought leadership symposium for key actors in Ghana’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.  We believe that intentional entrepreneurial ecosystem interventions, responsive financial and technical support, and redistributive modifications in fiscal policy for green private sector-led growth is needed to deliver social and economic transformation as well as climate justice for tomorrow’s world.  In tandem, promoting sustainable patterns of production in the economic sector must go hand in hand with changing unsustainable patterns of consumer consumption

We convene Incubating Innovation to inform, connect and engage on all of these variables.

Many of us here seated have the opportunity to join the growing GCIC Community at Ashesi University – a community of climate-smart entrepreneurs, eco-venture capital firms, donors, philanthropical organisations and global corporations committed to securing a prosperous ecologically sound tomorrow through climate-smart development.  We invite you to join this community as an entrepreneur, a mentor, a strategic corporate partner, a philanthropic donor.  We invite you to choose, together with us, a progressive, economically prosperous and ecologically sound future for Ghana.

It’s time to build a new land.  It’s time to teach a new way.  If not us, then who? If not now, then when? The world won’t get better, if we just let it be.  We have to change it, you and me.

Thank you for your attention.”

[1] UNHCR

[2] UN Environment’s Adaptation Finance Gap Report (2016),

[3] Lancet Medical Journal

[4] the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs