The Head of Listing and New Products at the Ghana Stock Exchange (GSE), Joyce Boakye, who made the statement at the Women Investment Summit Africa, said the Ghana Alternative Market (GAX), an innovative market operated by the GSE with focus on growing businesses, offered the platform for people to invest in SMEs and ensure their growth.

She said since the GAX was set up in 2013, only six companies had so far been registered on the market mainly because most SMEs were of the misconception that the Stock Exchange was far beyond the reach of their operations and required a difficult process to list on the market.

Ms Boakye, however, said the alternative market rather provided SMEs guidance and opportunity to raise their capital for their operations and encouraged businesses to take advantage of the GAX to grow and expand their operations as well as profits.

"Apart from the platform for investment, the GAX accommodates SMEs at various stages of their development, including start-ups and existing enterprises, both small and medium, providing them the visibility needed to thrive," she said.

Ms Boakye also stated that although the GAX was open to all, it required a high level of standards and companies that were market ready.

Nonetheless, Ms Boakye said the GAX provided an incubation period to train companies and SMEs on the right structures such as book-keeping to keep them transparent and competitive for the global market.

 ShEconomy

The Women Investment Summit Africa was organised by the Oxford Africa Women Leadership Institute (OAWLI) under their women economic empowerment project dubbed the ShEconomy Africa Project.

The summit brought together women in SMEs from all 36 countries that the project has made its footprint.

Participants were engaged on how to grow their businesses and the importance of book-keeping.

The Global Director of the OAWLI, Odelia Ntiamoah, said the summit was as a result of data collected from a thousand women on what they needed to promote their businesses.

She said from their research, the two things that came up most was access to finance and access to the market.

“And so this summit was to gather these women and help them deal and address these challenges that hinder the growth of their businesses,” she said.

Mrs Ntiamoah further urged SMEs and companies to be transparent with their businesses and inculcate the habit of book-keeping because that was what companies ready to invest were looking out for.

“Book-keeping is becoming a general problem and so I am calling on incubators, government agencies and everyone in the SME ecosystem to actually pay particular attention to this area because it is what will make them bankable and have access to finance and if their books don’t look clean nobody would want to deal with them,” she added.

Taxes

The Director for Domestic Tax Revenue Division of the Ashanti Regional Office of the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA), Agnes Akosua Adu-Boateng, charged businesses to pay their taxes, especially businesses with a turnover of GH¢200,000 threshold were required to pay taxes.

“Once you are doing a business and you are earning income you have to come to the GRA and register to pay taxes,” she said.

Paying taxes, she said, would help maximise revenue to pay for government social intervention projects among other government interventions.