Introduction
Energy is arguably one of the most vital economic drivers in the world at large. However, when harm caused by fossil fuels to the health of humans, the environment and the ecosystem is catching up with the benefits, there should be the redirection of focus. This has resulted in a focus shift to the renewable energy, where countries in the European Union, United States, China, and others, are setting the pace in renewable energy solutions. Africa, with a huge potential of renewable energy resources such as solar, wind, waste-to-energy, geothermal, hydro, and others, is still lagging behind in renewable energy solutions. This thesis attempts to focus on renewable energy solutions in Ghana by first finding out the state of the business environment in Ghana as well as what renewable energy solutions are most likely to be successful in Ghana.
In the following sections, the business environment in Ghana will be analyzed using the PESTEL (Political, economic, socio cultural, technological, ecological and legal) framework and the energy situation of Ghana also presented.
1.1 The Background
This thesis is conducted for CONNECT project of Laurea University of Applied Sciences. The connect project to provide growth and boost up the internationalization efforts of Finnish Small and Medium Scale Enterprises (SMEs) entry into developing country markets. This thesis was based on a questionnaire administered to the renewable energy Directorate of the Ministry of energy in Ghana and interview transcripts of prominent people in the ministry. The main aim of the questionnaire is to solicit for credible information from the main ministry necessary to support the research process of the CONNECT project.
1.2 The Aim and target
The aim of this thesis is serve as part of the research for the CONNECT project. Ghana is one of the target countries of the Finnish SMEs; therefore this thesis specifically concerns Finnish renewable energy companies interested in providing renewable energy solutions in Ghana.
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