Chief Executive Officer of MTN Ghana, Michael Ikpoki has assured small and medium-scale enterprises (SMEs) in the country that MTN Business was designing a comprehensive package geared towards supporting the sector to grow. Speaking to editors and senior journalists in Accra, Mr. Ikpoki noted that the SMEs sector is the foundation and bedrock of every economy anywhere in the world and MTN believed that contributing to the growth of that sector goes a long way to fast track national development. “One area we are going to focus on in the next quarter or so is SMEs…we are going to come up with specific products design to encourage SME growth in Ghana,” he said. Mr. Ikpoki said MTN sees itself as more than just a telecoms operator but an organization committed to being a catalyst to economic development of every country it operates in. “Between 2008 and now the taxes we have paid alone is up to GHS 980 million and that shows that we are a responsible corporate citizen here to support national development,” he said. He stated that MTN had always been committed to enriching the lives of its customers and of the people in the communities they operated in, adding that “our passion is to always come up with ideas, projects and plans relevant to our customers and communities.” “In a next month or so we will come out with reports from a research on how our various interventions has enriched the lives of people in Ghana and we hope the media will project that information as one of the landmark achievement of this company,” he said. Mr. Ikpoki noted that during the recent MTN 21 Days Yello’ Care, the company planted 10,000 trees instead of the 9,000 we promised in Ghana, saying this was 20 per cent of the 50,000 that the entire MTN Group set out to plant in its 21 operations. He attributed the success of MTN and its projects to the immense support from the media and assured that MTN would continue to encourage media excellence anyway it could. “We have a dynamic media in Ghana such that nothing really [is] hidden in this country,” he said. Touching on the forthcoming Mobile Number Portability (MNP), Mr. Ikpoki sad MNP provided an opportunity for MTN to welcome more people unto their network, adding that MTN was excited about it and keen to welcome MNP and the new customers it would bring. He said MTN was confident that its existing value offering and network quality among other things were enough to win it more customers under MNP. “We are not shy of investment - we have invested up to $285 million to establish three data centres – we have 67 service centres, and 12 more to come this year,” he said. Mr. Ikpoki noted that data penetration in Ghana was only up to five per cent and that was very small compared to the volume of development going on in Ghana at the moment. He observed that there was a huge opportunity for data in Ghana and MTN hopes that the WACS submarine cable it had landed in Ghana would provide more than enough capacity to increase data bandwidth across the country when it goes active in the first quarter of next year. “We believe that with the level of development we are seeing in Ghana, the economic growth and the huge direct investment, we need to have adequate data capacity and MTN will be doing a lot in that area,” he said. Corporate Service Executive of MTN Ghana, Mawuena Trebarh also announced that MTN Foundation had received approval to do economic empowerment projects in addition to its investments in education and health. She said so far the foundation has invested about GHS 4.4 million into various education and health projects that had gone a long way to enrich the lives of people in various communities. Story by Samuel Nii Narku Dowuona/Adom News/Ghana