Coronavirus Alleviation Program

About 110,000 MSMEs in Ghana were said to be owned by women who have benefited from the funds set by the government.^[13] In October 2020, government launched an amount to aid banks in Ghana to give financial help to SMEs for their recovery from the shocks of the pandemic.^[14] The executive director of NBSSI claimed there was an approval for the disbursement of stimulus packages to over 1,000 private schools in the country.^[15]

The NBSSI in partnership with the Mastercard Foundation launched the Nkosuo Program for the support of both formal and informal sectors who were affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.^[16]

24 hours after the President launched the GH¢1 billion Coronavirus Alleviation Programme (CAP) Business Support Scheme, the National Board and Small Scale Industries (NBSSI) was flooded with applications from businesses seeking the opportunity to benefit from the stimulus package. It is estimated that the board received more than 8,000 applications from interested businesses as of the close of business on the day.^[17]

Even though the program was launched to cushion Ghanaian businesses, it somewhat failed to account the peculiar needs of persons with disabilities (PWDs) in its implementation. Research estimates that, only 7% of PWDs benefited from the program.^[18]

It was also revealed that Micro, Small and Medium Enterprise (MSME) in the North East Gonja District in the Savannah Region of Ghana did not benefit from the program.

It has also been revealed that district service providers were not well informed on the government's COVID-19 relief packages to educate the beneficiaries while the eligibility requirements for accessing the packages were not entirely clear to potential beneficiaries.

Information on the intervention was highly politicised as political figures were the carriers of the information in the district.^[19]