On October 13, SEED hosted the online workshop “A showcase of policy solutions benefiting Africa’s circular economy MSMEs”, as part of the circular economy conference track at the WRF2021.

During the MSME Policy Collaboration Lab at the World Resources Forum, panelists highlighted the role of eco-inclusive enterprises play towards an economy valuing waste and in its transition to a circular economy. Dzifa Agbefu, Plant Manager from JVL-YKMA Recycling Plant, shared the enterprise’s mission, business model and impact. She also talked about enabling policy and her vision for improved government support for circularity relevant enterprises.

Letitia Abra-Kom Nyaaba, Deputy Director at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and Wisdom Adongo, Senior Project Officer at Private Enterprise Federation, presented Ghana’s waste policy context and how MSME are affected by this. They shared a draft solution for an industry waste platform matching supply and demand for industrial by-products, as well as policy recommendations for Ghana’s circularity stakeholders.

The main take-aways from the sessions were that MSMEs have a significant contribution to make to circularity, as they have the transformative potential of eco-inclusive entrepreneurship to speed up the adoption of a circular economy upstream and downstream. However, government policy is often focused on larger private sector players, resulting in lack of sup-port and funding for smale-scale players. 

Some policy recommendations were suggested to improve the support that these smaller players receive, such as the importance of providing technology access and support on digitalization of processes, or offering skill development, like vocational and technical training, skill upgradation, skill mapping, certification, etc.

Other recommendations from our local Ghana experiences include the promotion of policies that make landfilling unattractive, the creation of incentives for SMEs to find alternative uses of waste, or the set-up of a network of collection centres that aggregate waste streams in commercial quantities.