Regulatory environment assessment

AGRA wanted to advocate for reform of Ghana’s business registration and product certification processes, on the grounds that they were shutting youth and small agribusinesses out of the formal economy. To do that they needed evidence, and there was very little of it: plenty of published procedure, almost nothing on what the process actually costs a person trying to get through it.

The awkward part is that the two sides do not describe the same system. The regulators describe the process as written down. The entrepreneurs describe the process as experienced. An assessment that only captured one of those would have produced recommendations aimed at a problem nobody has.

The study ran in three phases over twelve weeks: a desk review of the legislation and the agencies that administer it, then primary qualitative fieldwork, then analysis and reporting.

I worked on the instruments and the analysis. The interview and discussion guides were built to put the same questions to both sides — regulators and agencies on one hand, agripreneurs and MSMEs on the other — so the two accounts could be compared directly rather than reported side by side.

Fieldwork was key informant interviews with regulatory bodies, ministries and private sector institutions, plus focus group discussions with agripreneurs in Northern Ghana. Every session was recorded and transcribed, and coding started while collection was still running, so gaps showed up in time to go back and fill them rather than after the field team had gone home.

Coding and thematic analysis were done in MAXQDA. Transcripts were coded to a framework that grew out of the material — bureaucratic delay, cost, awareness, gender, accessibility, compliance pressure — and then refined into sub-themes and counted, so a finding could be reported as a share of respondents rather than as an impression.

The headline finding was a gap between belief and fact. Entrepreneurs consistently described registration as prohibitively expensive; a sole proprietorship costs 120 cedis. What actually stops people is the belief that registering triggers an immediate tax bill, the absence of anyone to guide them through it, and repeat trips to an office because the requirements were never made clear.

Seventy per cent of respondents pointed to bureaucratic delay. Against a published two-to-five working day turnaround, people reported going back and forth for over a month. Women were registering far less than men in farming while dominating processing and packaging, held back by capital, land tenure and the time the process demands.

The findings went into a policy document setting out the registration and certification requirements alongside the reforms the evidence supports — a startup desk inside the regulators, agencies bringing registration out to the districts, and tax incentives that are actually communicated to the people eligible for them.