YouStart — Ghana's National Youth Entrepreneurship Fund

YouStart is Ghana's state-backed youth-entrepreneurship fund, announced in the 2021 budget and implemented by the Ghana Enterprises Agency (GEA, formerly NBSSI) together with the National Entrepreneurship and Innovation Programme. Young entrepreneurs progress through Basic, Intermediate and Advanced training tiers before becoming eligible for grants, loans or equity finance to start or grow a business.
By October 2023, 23,695 entrepreneurs had completed Basic-level training, with 7,975 reaching Intermediate and 4,514 reaching Advanced level. The GEA disbursed GH¢65 million to over 3,000 startups and MSMEs under the World Bank co-financed Ghana Jobs and Skills Project, and signed a further GH¢100 million grant tranche to beneficiaries in November 2023. GEA's chief executive has stated that more than 30,000 people are now in gainful employment through the initiative, though this figure is self-reported and has not been independently audited.
The government allocated GH¢200 million to YouStart for 2024 and set a target of supporting 50,000 startups and MSMEs that year — but reaching it required seeking a further $150 million credit line from the World Bank. That gap between the original GH¢1 billion fund envisioned at launch and the roughly GH¢165 million actually disbursed by late 2023 is a useful caution: headline funding announcements for youth-enterprise programmes do not always translate into commensurate disbursement, and continued delivery has come to depend on external development-bank financing rather than domestic budget alone.

Read the full analysis: https://gna.org.gh/2023/11/youstart-grant-signing-govt-supports-startups-and-msmes-with-ghs-100-million-in-2023/