Aligning solar PV policy with the realities of Ghanaian firms is essential to turning renewable energy growth into stronger domestic businesses and greater local value creation. Ghana’s policies recognise financing, technology, and skills constraints, but enterprise support often falls short of the specific assistance solar firms need to invest and grow.
This policy brief by Daryl Bosu, Fiona Neena Achiamaa Frimpong, Mohammed Saani Osman, and Charles Gyamfi Ofori examines the gap between policy ambitions and firms’ experiences. It proposes targeted support that connects enterprise development, accessible finance, technological learning, skills, and market opportunities.
What Ghanaian solar firms need
Survey findings show a sector dominated by small businesses operating mainly in downstream activities. Half of respondents employed between one and ten workers, while a further 43.8% employed between 11 and 49 people. Irregular project revenues make it difficult to retain skilled workers, maintain stable operations, and invest consistently.
Around 62.5% of surveyed firms operated as solution providers or systems integrators, while only 12.5% had entered assembly or light manufacturing. Nearly half sourced less than 25% of their key inputs locally.
International partnerships are widespread, but they do not consistently transfer engineering, production, or managerial capabilities. Training is also largely reactive and task-specific, limiting the development of specialised expertise.
Making existing support work for solar enterprises
The brief identifies a mismatch between broad enterprise-support programmes and the technological, financial, and productive needs of solar businesses.
Institutions such as the Ghana Enterprises Agency and Development Bank Ghana provide important foundations. However, firms continue to report costly finance, difficult eligibility requirements, policy inconsistency, and limited awareness of available programmes.
Local participation requirements can create market opportunities. Complementary support is needed to help domestic firms develop the capabilities to compete for those opportunities and move into higher-value activities.
Five priorities for targeted enterprise development
The brief recommends:
- Establish a Solar Enterprise Development Programme. Map firms’ capabilities and provide tailored business, engineering, and digital support. Publish selection criteria, investment amounts, and performance milestones, with eligibility based on credible upgrading plans.
- Make finance usable. Combine credit guarantees, concessional loans, equipment leasing, working-capital facilities, and results-based grants. Help firms prepare bankable proposals and meet funding requirements, with disbursements linked to quality milestones and monitoring.
- Structure partnerships for learning. Match firms with credible technology providers and provide legal and commercial advice. Use measurable commitments to support technology transfer, skills development, and supplier upgrading.
- Connect capable firms to demand. Maintain a verified supplier directory, publish market opportunities, provide tender-readiness support, and facilitate relationships with public and private buyers.
- Collaborate on skills development. Co-design modular training with firms, technical and vocational institutions, and universities, covering installation, design, project management, quality assurance, battery systems, maintenance, manufacturing, and recycling.
Coordinating these measures would help Ghana translate policy commitments into practical support for enterprise upgrading. By connecting finance, skills, technology, and demand, government and industry can strengthen domestic productive capabilities and retain more economic and technological value from the expanding solar market.
About the project
This publication is an output of Advancing a Just Energy Transition: Localisation, Decent Work, and Sustainable Livelihoods, a multi-country research project examining the energy sectors of Ghana, Kenya, and South Africa in the context of global decarbonisation. The project investigates how localisation, decent work, gender equity, SMME participation, and sustainable livelihoods can be embedded in renewable energy production networks to strengthen local manufacturing and avoid reproducing unequal global economic patterns.