The trader who couldn’t get a loan: A story Ghana knows too well

Her name does not matter. You know her already.

She wakes up before five every morning. She is at the market by six. She knows every supplier by name, negotiates prices in three languages, manages stock, handles cash, extends informal credit to loyal customers, and by the end of the day has turned a clean profit consistently, week after week, year after year.

She has been doing this for nine years.

She wants to expand. She has found a second location. She has done the numbers in her head and the numbers work. All she needs is a loan. A modest one. Enough to stock the new stall and cover three months of operating costs while the new location finds its feet.

So she goes to the bank.

She is told she needs three years of audited financial statements. A business registration certificate. Collateral, preferably property. A credit history with a formal banking system.

She has none of these things.

Not because she is irresponsible. Not because her business is not viable. But because she has been operating entirely outside a system that was never designed to see her.

She leaves the bank without the loan. The second location does not happen. The economy loses what she would have built.
Multiply that story by three million. That is Ghana.

The invisible economy

Ghana’s informal sector accounts for a significant portion of our GDP and employs the majority of our working population. Market traders, artisans, seamstresses, mechanics, food vendors, kente weavers, construction workers, transport operators these are not peripheral figures in our economy. They are the economy.

And yet the formal financial system like the banks, the investment houses, the credit facilities was largely designed around a different person. Someone with a payslip. A registered company. A fixed address. A paper trail.

The result is a profound and costly mismatch. Enormous pools of economic energy sit untapped because the bridge between ambition and capital has a toll gate most people cannot pay.

This is not just a social problem. It is an economic one. And it is one we can solve.

What financial exclusion actually costs

We tend to talk about financial exclusion in humanitarian terms — as though it is primarily a question of fairness. And it is. But it is also a question of growth.

When a viable business cannot access credit, it does not grow. When it does not grow, it does not hire. When it does not hire, unemployment stays high. When unemployment stays high, consumption stays low. When consumption stays low, the economy underperforms.

Financial exclusion is not a problem at the edges of the economy. It is a drag on the whole thing.

The trader who could not get her loan is not just a story about one woman. It is a story about what Ghana’s GDP could be and is not because we have not yet built the financial infrastructure her ambition deserves.

The good news: The tools now exist

Here is where the story changes because it genuinely can.

The rise of digital finance has made it possible, for the first time in history, to assess creditworthiness without traditional paperwork. Mobile money transaction history reveals income patterns, cash flow consistency, and financial behaviour with remarkable accuracy. Digital payment records tell a story that bank statements never could because they capture real economic activity, not just the portion that passed through formal channels.

In other words, that trader who has been running her stall successfully for nine years? She has been building a credit profile the whole time. She just could not see it. And neither could the bank.

The infrastructure to change this exists. The data exists. The technology exists. What is required now is the will from financial institutions, from regulators, from policymakers, and from society to use it deliberately and inclusively.

What inclusive finance actually looks like

It looks like a loan application that asks about mobile money history, not audited accounts.

It looks like insurance products priced for daily earners, not monthly salary recipients.

It looks like savings tools designed around irregular income because most Ghanaians do not earn the same amount every month, and a savings product that does not accommodate that reality will not be used.

It looks like financial literacy that reaches people in markets and churches and community centers in Twi, in Ewe, in Ga, in Dagbani not just in English on a website nobody visits.

It looks like a system that sees the trader, the seamstress, the mechanic, and the food vendor not as risks to be managed but as customers to be served and citizens to be empowered.

A different question

We spend a great deal of time asking: “How do we get more Ghanaians into the formal financial system?”

That is a good question. But I want to suggest a better one:

“How do we build a financial system worthy of the Ghanaians already in it?”

Because she is already there. She has been there for nine years. She wakes up before five. She knows her suppliers. She manages her cash. She grows her business with what she has, because the system has not yet caught up with what she deserves.

It is time for the system to catch up.
 
Ms. Nana Konadu Yiadom Boateng is a practitioner in digital financial infrastructure and marketing insight across Ghana. She holds the following qualifications:

•Certified Expert in Digital Finance — Frankfurt School of Finance & Management

•MSc Marketing Analytics — University of Southampton

•BA Marketing with Business Studies — Middlesex University

•HND Marketing — Ho Technical University

•Associate Member - CIMG