500 market women undergo training on simple book keeping

The Women in Entrepreneurship- Ghana (WIEG), a group promoting women empowerment, has organised a one-day business management workshop for traders in the Sunyani Municipality of the Bono Region to hone their skills to improve their business operations.

The workshop, which brought together more than 500 participants drawn mainly from the Nana Bosoma Market (Wednesday Market), was to equip the women with the requisite knowledge to transform their businesses.

As part of the outreach, WIEG shared over 500 notepads and pens to the participants, which were all geared towards encouraging the traders to practice simple book keeping.

Miss Sylvia Tweneboah-Koduah, President of WIEG, who led the WIEG delegation, noted that the workshop which also touched on good customer relations aimed at highlighting basic principles of managing businesses.

She said the training within the area became necessary after it was observed that the illiteracy rate of participants was high, as majority were not keeping records of their daily transactions.

The President said some of the benefits of keeping good account was that “the individual is able to monitor his or her in flows and out flows, and this also helps them to make decisions on time as to whether they are actually benefiting or making losses”.

Miss Tweneboah-Koduah said the investments of many market women had gone waste because they could not apply sound business practices.

She said it was therefore, imperative that these traders adopt new strategies in line of their activities to keep them in business, saying “so as part of the workshop they were taught home management; the need to desist from unnecessary expenditures; and also desist from impulse buying”.

Miss Tweneboah-Koduah was optimistic that the workshop would boost skills and techniques needed for their businesses to flourish.

Maame Akua, a tomato seller, who was part of the trainees, said she did not write down activities she undertook as part of her business and usual forgets her transactions.

She said this bad practice usual leads to loss of revenue and therefore expressed gratitude to WIEG for the assistance.