Ghana's Investing Ecosystem

Map of Ghana's
Investing Ecosystem

Understand Ghana’s investing ecosystem - This interactive database presents organisations in Ghana’s investing ecosystem, highlighting companies driving impact intentionally, and funders catalysing that impact through capital arranged on concessional terms

Click on either button below to explore the impact investing and catalytic capital maps

About the map

This map of Ghana’s investing ecosystem, developed through research data, provides an overview of Ghana’s impact investing and catalytic capital investment landscape in the SME financing sector. It shows which organizations make up the ecosystem, who is deploying catalytic capital within the SME space, the type of beneficiaries targeted, the lifecycle stage of the enterprises that the investments target and the kinds of financial instruments used. The insights offered by the map will enable key institutions to better strategize and mobilise impact investments and catalytic capital in ways that can unlock additional appropriate commercial capital for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and to achieve developmental impact.

How was the data collected?

This study employed both qualitative and quantitative research tools for data curation, analysis, and reporting, beginning with desk research and an examination of peer-reviewed reports on SME financing with a focus on catalytic capital dating back to 2004. That marks the enactment date of the Venture Capital Trust Fund ACT, 2004 (ACT 680), a major policy initiative by the Government to support the private sector. The desk research was guided by the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses) standard widely used in scientific reporting. The understanding we arrived at enabled us to frame our study by identifying previous key learnings, which informed the design of our instruments for cross-sectional data collection. We conducted interviews with purposely selected catalytic investors that provide capital for ecosystem-building, technical assistance, and blended finance and beneficiary SMEs across various sectors and regions of the country.

The process behind this map

1
Research questions

A series of research questions were developed to tease out where and how impact investing and catalytic capital have been deployed in Ghana to drive the growth of SMEs.

2
Interviews and industry consultations

We interviewed 24 selected catalytic investors—suppliers and intermediaries of funds ranging from development finance institutions and fund managers to microfinance companies and commercial, rural and community banks. We also interviewed 25 beneficiary SMEs from various sectors and regions of the country, as well as industry and academic experts with deep knowledge and experience of SME financing in Ghana.

3
Supplementary data

We surveyed randomly 164 suppliers and intermediaries of funds and 200 beneficiary SMEs. We analysed 15 cases of catalytic financing initiatives, impact funds, and investments in SMEs.