Eighty-nine percent of businesses have been affected negatively by the covid -19 pandemic, the Association of Ghana Survey on Impact of covid-19 on businesses has revealed.

5% of businesses were however not affected by the pandemic and 6% were positively impacted.

According to the survey which was carried out in late September 2020, about 75% of firms scaled down their production and this cut across all sectors. The scaling down of production was marginally higher with small firms and African Giants.

72% of businesses are presently operating between 25%-50% of their production capacity.

According to the research, the trend of sales turnover in the past quarter had been a steady decrease of the sales turnover over the past three quarter.

Between quarter four 2019 and quarter two 2020, there have been a general decrease (greater than 60%) in sales turnover across all business sector.

Also, a highly significant majority of businesses (81%) are not likely to meet their revenue target this year.

 However, the reality is more pessimistic for the construction sector with only 7% that could meet this year target.

Business situation

In the second quarter of this year, about 60% of the companies experienced worse business situation.

However, the third quarter saw 17% returning to normalcy and 9% saw an improvement of their business situation.

Meanwhile, there are top 10 major challenges facing businesses in Ghana today.

They are cash flow constraints (59%), lack of contracts (52%), high costs of available supplies (38%), difficulty in paying staff (34%), market for goods/services (32%) and lack of supplies/inputs (21%).

Others are exchange rate volatility (21%), inability to deliver orders (17%), access to credit (17%) and difficulty in paying SSNIT (3%).

Methodology

Respondents were selected from AGI membership list, using stratified random sampling.

Interviews were also conducted via Computer Assisted Web interviews and partly face-to-face.

The questionnaire was scripted in google forms and the link was shared to respondents to self-administer.

All the 10 traditional regions of Ghana were captured.