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Mr. Moses Yengnemenga, the Program Officer of the Kosmos Innovation Centre (KIC)’s Agritech Challenge, Upper West Region, has said that farming is the only investment sector that has the potential to yield 30 percent dividends in a space of three months.
He said this during the seminar and launch of the Simon Diedong Dombo University of Business and Integrated Development Studies (SDD UBIDS) chapter of the KIC Youth Agripreneurs Forum (YAF) over the weekend.
Mr. Yengnemenga indicated that there was no investment one could make and earn 30 percent returns in a period of three months except in farming.
“There’s no investment you can actually make today and get 30 percent returns in three months, but in farming, you can actually get 30 percent returns on your investment in three months,” he said.
Mr Yengnemenga, addressing the gathering of students and young people, encouraged them to take advantage of the numerous opportunities which are presented as challenges in the agricultural sector and create businesses out of them.
He urged the students and young people to change their mindsets about agriculture as a ‘hoe and cutlass’ venture and move out of their ways to grab the opportunities that were available in the increasingly evolving agricultural sector.
He, however, identified the unwillingness of financial institutions to offer loan assistance to startups in the agricultural sector, which were mostly without capital collateral assets, as a major setback to young entrepreneurs in the sector.
“The banks are not willing to give you money, because agric in general, they see it to be risky so they don’t want to give loan unless you’re a bigger company that has a lot of physical assets to use as a collateral,” he explained.
Meanwhile, Mr. Seidu Mubarak, the General Manager of Antika Company Limited, an agribusiness firm in the Upper West Region, cautioned the students and young people against taking loans to start ventures in the agricultural sector.
“What I’ve come to realize as a third generation person in the business is that we don’t start a business, particularly in agribusiness, with a loan and that is the first thing I want to caution all of us; that do not start an agribusiness with a loan, and the banks would not even give you.
“Antika as big as it is, in my last 14 years in the business there, we had just one loan from a financial institution, just one loan, and honestly speaking, that loan, we had wished we never took it…at the end of the day, we paid almost two-and-half times the cost of the loan,” he said from a practical point of view.
He intimated that being an entrepreneur was not a task so easier or attained on silver platter but that it requires hard work and tenacity.
He added that the spirit of entrepreneurship should be harnessed and nurtured by the individual herself or himself who must be willing to work out their energies to ensure success.
“It’s you yourself that would challenge yourself to be that entrepreneur that will be willing to burn your fingers, that will be willing to fall many times and still be on your feet and say that, I’m going to make it,” said.
Dr Felicia Naatu, the Head of Department of Marketing and Entrepreneurship at the SDD UBIDS, urged the students and aspiring entrepreneurs to foster team building and networking amongst themselves so as to get the best out of their team members and friends to enhance success in their endeavours.
She, thus, encouraged them to be active and good team players and always be ready and willing to contribute to the success of their teams.
“Do not only wait until you know a person before you’re nice to them, and do not only wait until you’re called upon to contribute before you contribute, and do not think your work belongs to others,” Dr Naatu advised.
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