A business accelerator and impact investment platform, Innohub in partnership with Wangara Green Ventures, a climate-smart Small and Medium-sized Enterprise (SME) fund, has launched the Women-In-Climate Accelerator programme.

A statement from Innohub, copied to the Ghana News Agency, said it has been established that the impact of climate change was experienced by men and women differently and it further increased gender inequality.

Women, it said, were increasingly seen as more vulnerable than men to the impact of climate change, mainly because they represented the majority of the world's poor and were proportionally more dependent on threatened natural resources. 

Thus, women continue to be held back by structural constraints and gender norms related to access and control of natural resources, unequal participation in decision making in environmental planning, governance, and uneven access to socio-economic benefits and services.

The statement said in most developing countries, women-led businesses were side-lined and marginalized due to the uneven gender opportunities in business financing.

However, it said research showed that giving women the same access to productive resources as men, could contribute significantly to the sustainable management and use of natural resources, which impacted the global environment with significant social impacts.

The Women-In-Climate Accelerator was in response to the identified challenges, and it had a specific focus on female-led climate-related SMEs, and SMEs in other sectors with best-in-class climate practices particularly within the Clean Energy, Climate-smart Agriculture, and Water, Sanitation and Hygiene sectors, the statement said.

It would provide women-led climate smart SMEs with tailored business acceleration support with clear deliverables, adopting a value creation outlook.

The programme would also adopt core growth consulting methodologies intended to put women-led climate smart SMEs on the path of sustained growth and make them investment ready.

The statement said benefits of the programme would include sponsored growth consulting support, access to coaches and mentors, investor matching opportunities with investment partners such as Wangara Green Ventures and Accra Angels Network, and co-working spaces that provided the entrepreneurs with the needed infrastructure for collaboration.

It is expected to run for one-year combining virtual sessions, tailored one-on-one consulting sessions, group training, and peer review sessions using best practices that would ensure optimum outcomes.