Small- to medium-sized enterprises, or SMEs, are invaluable to any economy. They can help catalyse job creation, reduce poverty, provide basic goods and services, and generate the export and tax revenues that help societies develop.They can even help to provide infrastructure and facilities like water, roads and electricity, and to diversify the country’s economy, making societies more stable.Ghana’s economy has reaped many of these social and economic benefits from its high percentage of SMEs. Making up 92 percent of the country’s firms, they employ about 85 percent of the country’s manufacturing workers. Until 2011, the manufacturing sector, which is dominated by SMEs, had been contributing about 70 percent to Ghana’s GDP. (This figure then dropped to 49 percent, mainly thanks to the commercial natural gas and oil production that began in the first quarter of 2011.) With the exception of a few privatised state- owned enterprises or natural-resource monopolies, most of the large, successful firms in Ghana evolved from SMEs.