Ghanaian businesses have been charged to leverage on lessons from COVID-19 to accelerate development through trade and stay competitive in the global economy.

This is according to Emmanuel Asumani, Director of Operations for the ILO-SCORE program.

Speaking to Citi Business News on the sidelines of a workshop to train Small and Medium sized enterprises on international best practices, Mr. Asumani also urged businesses to pay more attention to the quality of goods produced as well as the cost of production.

“We are in a global village and goods that are coming from China are not so different from those which are being produced in Ghana. Our local enterprises must come to term with building resilient institutions. Managers and workers must work together, and we must understand that every consumer is interested in the quality of the product we produce as well as the cost of it so, as a team, we must address these key issues. In fact, the only way that we can survive in the global market is that we are particular about the cost and about the quality of our product,” he said.

The Sustaining Competitive and Responsible Enterprises (SCORE) program is part of the International Labour Organisation’s contribution to enhancing the capacity of the informal sector due to its effect on the country’s economy.

It is a scheme that seeks to improve the productivity and working conditions of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in the country.

SCORE was launched in 2011 in Ghana with funding from the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) of Switzerland and the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD).

Since then, SCORE activities have been implemented in various phases: Phase I, Phase II, and Phase III which ends at the close of 2021.

About 215 SMEs have benefited from SCORE training in Ghana. Some outcomes of this training are production cost reduction, improved delivery time, better working conditions for employees, waste reduction, less defects and safer working environment.