GNCCI's Working Capital Management Training — A Randomised Trial Lifting Accra SME Profits by 26%

The Ghana National Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GNCCI) partnered with researchers Lordina Amoah, John Amoah and Julius Lamptey, funded by the International Growth Centre, to test whether training in working-capital management could improve the financial performance of small and medium enterprises in the Greater Accra Region.
288 GNCCI-member SMEs were randomly assigned to a treatment group (138 firms) or a pure control group (150 firms). Treated firms received two days of on-site training on inventory, receivables, payables and cash management, plus post-training field-visit consultations and a WhatsApp group with the training facilitator. Control firms received no training.
Compared with the control group, treated SMEs showed significantly higher working-capital literacy and better working-capital management practices, along with improved sales, a reduced cash-conversion cycle and an estimated 26% increase in profit.
The September 2024 policy brief recommends embedding the curriculum in GNCCI's district-level Business Resource Centres and Ghana Enterprises Agency programmes, but as of publication the training had only been delivered once, to this single regional cohort, so the finding is a pilot-scale result rather than an evaluation of an established public programme.

Read the full analysis: https://ugbs.ug.edu.gh/faculty/lordina-amoah