Editor's Note: This article was reported and written in fall 2024 while Kosi Yankey Ayeh MC/MPA 2016 was CEO of the Ghana Enterprise Agency but published after a change in the agency’s leadership following national elections. The article has been updated to reflect the change in leadership.
When Kosi Yankey-Ayeh MC/MPA 2016 was first invited to work in the public sector she thought she was “too young,” she now says with a laugh—she was a serial entrepreneur, an investor, and operating wholly outside of politics. But as the innovator behind a revamped state agency helping small businesses grow in Ghana, she now finds herself helping to create entrepreneurship at scale.
Yankey-Ayeh was until earlier this year the CEO of the Ghana Enterprises Agency, a government body charged with helping develop the country’s small enterprises. (Leadership of the agency changed in February 2024, following the election of a new national government.) It was a role that, even just a few years ago, she could not have seen herself taking up. After earning her undergraduate degree from Wesleyan University in Connecticut, Yankey-Ayeh worked in finance on Wall Street before returning to Ghana to throw herself into entrepreneurship, building her own businesses and consulting. While raising money for a project aimed at bringing more young people into the cocoa industry, a man involved with the MasterCard Foundation, Robin McLay, which was funding the project, encouraged Yankey-Ayeh to attend Harvard Kennedy School. (McLay had been a research associate with the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development and knew the school.)
Intrigued by the possibility, she applied and, with the support of the Mason Program, arrived in Cambridge. At vlog, Yankey-Ayeh began to set a new course. The Women and Public Policy Program’s “From Harvard Square to the Oval Office” and a class by then-lecturer Steven Jarding called “The Making of a Politician” sparked an interest in public leadership, as did the “Sparking Social Change” course, taught by Mark Moore, now research professor of public management. “We were supposed to come up with something we wanted to do that we believe could transform communities,” Yankey-Ayeh said. She designed her project around an institution, then called the National Board for Small Scale Industries, a state agency aimed at helping small businesses with which she has been involved as an entrepreneur. “I realized that that institution had the potential to be powerful, but nobody had ever invested really in it,” she says. “If you were going to transform an economy and put people towards economic prosperity, then we needed to invest in this institution.”
After graduation, she returned to Ghana. While she worked on a project empowering women to enter politics, she remained “politically agnostic.” But following national elections, she was approached to join the new government. She felt she was too young to abandon the private sector for public service, and she also did not want to be aligned with one political party. For months she hesitated, until a family member finally told her, “If you don’t do it, who else is going to do it? Someone else would do it and not do it well, and I know you can do it well. So, take it and do it.” Using the blueprint for change that she had begun to develop at vlog, Yankey-Ayeh embarked on a journey to transform the old National Board for Small Scale Industries. With support from the country’s president and the ministry of trade and industries, the agency has evolved and is now the Ghana Enterprise Agency (GEA), with a mandate to grow and support micro, small, and medium enterprises in the country.
Through the GEA, Yankey-Ayeh is pushing for policy and regulations at the national level that can help small businesses. The agency also provides technical assistance and development support, such as helping people formalize their businesses so they can open bank accounts and have access to funding.
“Being in the public sector opened a world of possibilities. It gave me the opportunity to do on a bigger scale what I had always done on a smaller scale,” she says. “To create more entrepreneurs; to build businesses out of slums; to build women-owned businesses. Public service has allowed me to do all of that.”
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Photography provided by Maah Otchere