Scaffolding entrepreneurship: a local SME-NGO partnership to enable cocoa production in Ghana

This research used case study to explore how a small-to-medium enterprise (SME) domestic cocoa processor in Ghana collaborated with a Ghanaian non-governmental organization (NGO) to address barriers to the venture’s expansion. From in-depth interviews with key stakeholders, our results found that challenges raised by low print-literacy and shifting, unclear, or inaccessible regulatory/certification requirements – including work certification for employees, site conformance, and third-party food-safety testing – hindered the SME’s growth and mandated its consultation with the NGO in order to navigate these linguistic and regulatory barriers. This study contributes on two fronts to the emerging literature around SME-NGO collaborations as sustainable hybrid social enterprises. First, it highlights a need for increased nontraditional funding streams (beyond microfinancing) to support SME activity, given that front-end and/or ongoing consultancy and certification costs effectively ‘price-out’ access and participation by otherwise qualified and potentially economically contributory actors. Second, it illustrates how this kind of sustainable hybrid social enterprise can better enable market access and operation by partner-SMEs when the NGO helps to ‘bridge the gap’ between local SME business practices and the demands of an existing regulatory or certification regime. Further implications from this study for sustainable development and future research into social enterprise collaborations are discussed.