Christened the ‘Made in North­ern Ghana (MING) Marketplace digital platform’, the application which was officially launched at Wa in the Upper West Region on Tuesday seeks to enhance access to products and services in the northern part of the country and to open them to the global market.

The Regional Manager of the GNCCI, Mr Jeremiah Tengan, stated on Friday that the Chamber commissioned a research into the performance of products from the northern part of the country on the global market and identified that the goods from the north re­ceived less attention on the global market.

“Products such as smock and shea butter from the north are good but they receive very limited showcase globally and unfortu­nately have very poor marketing network,” he said.

He mentioned that in collabo­ration with GIZ, the platform was created to facilitate the buying and selling of products and also make it easier to trade with people across the globe without geographic restrictions.

He mentioned that before the official launch of the platform, the team organised a sensitisation tour across the five northern regions; Upper West, Upper East, North­ern, North East and Savannah Regions, to create awareness of the platform.

He main­tained that the platform was an opportunity to have a reliable market for their products and to open them up to the global market.

“The Development Bank of Ghana (DBG) is poised to lend loans to people in business with a maximum of five to fifteen years to redeem the debt, and this will go a long way to improve their business,” he said.

The platform, he noted, sought to drive positive change and inno­vation in the business landscape in Ghana and help improve on the revenue of businesses in the northern part of the country.

For his part, Mr Reuben Binpori, the Inclusive Business Develop­ment Expert with MOAP, indi­cated that they have supported farmer groups, inputs dealers and processors to expand their vocation.

He said marketing in re­cent times had gone beyond interpersonal to digital where a wider audience is reached and adequate revenue is gen­erated.

“In view of this, the digitised platform which was well thought through was introduced to help Small and Medium-scale Enter­prises (SMEs) to enable them sell their products by connecting them to buyers all over the world,” he added.