Ghana's Digital Leap — One Entrepreneur at a Time

Abena runs a small fabric business from a market stall in Accra. For years, her customers were whoever happened to walk past. Her prices were set by instinct, her credit history was invisible to banks, and her growth was capped by geography. She had a smartphone, a product people wanted, and ambition. She had no bridge between where she was and where she could go.

Abena is not alone. Ghana's micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) account for the vast majority of the country's private sector employment, yet millions of entrepreneurs like Abena remain locked out of the digital economy and they are unable to access affordable finance, navigate e-commerce platforms, or benefit from the policy frameworks that shape the business environment around them.

That is the gap a UN Joint Programme, the Digital Transformation High-Impact Track Joint Programme, led by UNCTAD, UNDP, and UNCDF, is working to close. And in its second year, the results are beginning to show.

A Strategy Born from Listening

In June 2025, Ghana took a landmark step: the country's first-ever National E-commerce Strategy was validated at a high-level workshop attended by scores of stakeholders including government ministers and fintech founders, as well as women entrepreneurs, digital trade advocates and development partners. The Deputy Minister for Trade, Agribusiness, and Industry, Hon. Sampson Ahi, commended participants for their continued commitment to the development of the National E-commerce Strategy. He remarked that “the strategy… marks the beginning of a coordinated national effort to make e-commerce work for all Ghanaians.”

Grounding national policy in private sector realities and grassroots voices, the strategy directly supports SDG 8.3, which is “promoting policies that encourage productive activities, decent job creation, entrepreneurship, and the formalization of MSMEs.” For entrepreneurs like Abena, it means that the rules of the game are finally being written with her in mind.

The strategy is supported by a strengthened coordination framework. In September 2025, the country inaugurated a multi‑stakeholder E‑commerce Committee to steer and monitor digital trade reforms. The Committee brings together public institutions, regulators, private sector associations, academia and development partners. It oversees the implementation of the National E‑Commerce Strategy and the AfCFTA Digital Trade Protocol, a major agreement under the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) designed to create unified, continent‑wide rules for digital trade, as well as tracks progress in the development of e‑commerce and digital trade in Ghana, and coordinates initiatives led by development partners and other stakeholders.

A Platform That Opens Doors

The Joint Programme partnered with the Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT (GI-KACE) and the Ghana Enterprises Agency (GEA) to build something tangible: the MSME Digital Gateway. This is a platform designed to connect small businesses to markets, services, and opportunities they could not previously reach.  It was built with the realization that policy must be accessible.

After months of development, user testing, and refinement, the Gateway went live and was unveiled at Ghana's national MSME Day celebrations in June 2025, a fitting moment, given that the day exists to honor exactly the people the platform is built for. Over 7,500 MSMEs will be able to access business advisory support and other support services from the Gateway, while the Government of Ghana will integrate a digital platform for planning and monitoring e-commerce reforms.

For many MSMEs, the Gateway is a front door to the digital economy, aligned with SDG target to harness technology to promote women's empowerment. Plans are already underway to expand its reach to over 100 districts and to integrate an e-commerce module that will allow entrepreneurs to sell their products.

The gateway will include information on business registration and other support services, information on access to finance, capacity building tools, and an e-commerce marketplace to help MSMEs sell their products online," announced UNDP's Deputy Resident Representative, Shaima Hussein.

Finance That Fits

A platform without finance is a map without a road. The Joint Programme understood this from the start. For entrepreneurs like Abena, securing loans or investment capital remains one of the greatest hurdles

Five financial service providers including fintechs, savings and loans companies, and micro-credit institutions, were selected through a competitive process to design digital financial products specifically for women and youth-led MSMEs. The process is deliberately human-centred: before any product is prototyped, teams go into the field to understand what entrepreneurs actually need, where they live, and what barriers they face.

The goal is to redefine how the financial sector sees underserved markets, from risk to opportunity. The programme is de-risking that first step, so that the private sector penetrates and provides the much needed financial support to MSMEs without risks.

Building for the Long Game

What makes the Digital Transformation High-Impact Track Joint Programmes catalytic is the architecture underneath, the deliberate effort to ensure continuity even long after the end of the  programme.

The EU has joined as a strategic partner, with a potential 15 million EUR investment in private sector development in the pipeline. Impact investors and venture capitalists gathered at the Africa Impact Summit are beginning to see Ghana's MSME ecosystem differently. The Mastercard Foundation is exploring linkages with the Digital Gateway. The Overseas Development Institute and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit have supported developments at policy level, including the monitoring and coordination of the National E-commerce Strategy implementation.

The Joint Steering Committee includes government, the EU, and the UN, a governance structure designed for accountability and continuity. And at the center of it all are the Ministry of Trade, the Ghana Enterprises Agency, and the five financial service providers, each with a stake, a role, and a reason to keep going when the programme ends.

What This Looks Like for Abena

Abena does not know the name of the joint programme. She does not need to. What she will know is that there is now a platform where she can list her fabrics and reach buyers across the country. That there is a financial product designed around her cash flow, not a bank's assumptions. That the government's new e-commerce strategy was built with people like her in mind.

The digital economy is no longer a distant horizon for Ghana's entrepreneurs. It is becoming, piece by piece, a place they can enter.

This joint programme is supported by the UN Joint SDG Fund and implemented by UNCTAD, UNDP, and UNCDF in partnership with the Government of Ghana.