The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has scaled up support to technology-enabled startups to develop innovative and market-driven solutions to accelerate Ghana’s achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). 

The Fund, in partnership with Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) and MEST Africa,  is training 20 startups under its StartUp Lab accelerator programme to impact the well-being of children and young people. 

The 20, which are a third cohort of the programme and operating mainly in the education and health sectors, are undergoing a six-month training to improve their businesses and contribute to advancing the attainment of the SDGs. 

Nirav Shah, Manager – Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation, UNICEF, told the Ghana News Agency that with about seven years left, it had become critical to support programmes that would help to speed up progress to reach the goals. 

That, he said encouraged the Fund, having completed the programme with two cohorts and seeing the impact thereof, to come up with an enhanced module, to support businesses that were aligned with the SDGs in Ghana. 

Mr Shah said: “Half of the startups enrolled on the programme are in the education and health sector and shows how this is aligned with the achievement of the SDGs, so, we want to support the youth on their ideas and give them the opportunity to grow and let it be beneficial to their communities.” 

He added: “In Ghana, given the economy and job market, entrepreneurship is a key for young people to start and grow their ideas into businesses and the StartUp Lab wants to help such ideas, especially those that focuse on social issues.” 

He said UNICEF and its partners were helping startups by making them more resourceful and competitive and empowering them to solve socio-economic issues with funding and mentorship to accelerate their businesses beyond the six-month programme. 

Miss Rhema Andah, Venture Development Manager, MEST Africa, said the startups were carefully selected to ensure that their solutions helped promote the achievement of the SDGs as the 2030 timeline drew closer. 

She said: “We focus on intaking startups specifically working towards the SDGs, including education, healthcare and poverty and make experts in industry provide tailored support to their tech products to support the SDGs.” 

She said with the growing developments in the global economy, including Ghana, it was important that startups adapted to changes and ensured that they were always scaling up to provide solutions that met their customers’ needs, while supporting the attainment of the SGDs.  

Ms Portia Alanyo, a member of the third cohort told GNA that prior to enrolling on the UNICEF StartUp Lab accelerator programme, they faced difficulties in making agribusiness.

She was confident that the training, mentorship and opportunities associated with the programme would make them receive the needed financial and technical support and knowledge, to enable them to build products to satisfy customers’ needs. 

She said: “Our platform is helping provide decent jobs to unemployed agricultural graduates and contributing towards food security and we’re expecting to grow bigger, which means, more support to accelerate the achievement of the SDGs.” 