Distributional impacts of innovation and SME support in Ghana

The Government of Ghana, recognizing the importance of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in addressing youth unemployment and advancing economic and social policy goals, established the National Entrepreneurship and Innovation Programme (NEIP) in 2017. The NEIP aims to enable entrepreneurs, empower innovation and accelerate job creation for Ghana’s unemployed youth.

The project investigates both the performance of this national program and its distributional impacts on men and women. Specifically, the project has the following objectives: assess the performance and impacts of the NEIP from an equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) perspective; strengthen the capacities of project partners to assess innovation-support programs and promote policy learning for SME development; characterize the SME ecosystem and identify strategies to enhance SME development; and establish a community of practice to promote collaboration among institutions interested in EDI and innovation policy in Ghana.

The study adopts a gender-based analysis plus (GBA+) approach to systematically examine how differences, such as sex, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, age and mental or physical disability, affect NEIP outcomes. This approach will involve relevant groups (persons with disabilities, women, men and youth) in the survey. This will enable our team to investigate the EDI impacts of the NEIP.

This project is funded through IDRC’s open competition entitled Evidence for Innovation: Equity, diversity, inclusion and impact analyses of innovation-support programs for small and medium-sized enterprises.