Sun Shade Foundation

Sun Shade Foundation (SSF) exists to empower people economically while ensuring that those who live in poverty, particularly vulnerable women and children, are served in body, mind, and spirit. The springboard of SSF is compassionate business advisory and financial support services that includes a range of support services for its members through multiple local programs in strategic peri-urban, rural and urban areas of Ashanti region, and will eventually spread to other regions in Ghana. By 2029, SSF expects to empower the entire population of the economically forgotten Ghanaians to move out of extreme poverty through strategic goals:

• Financial Support Services: This includes urban and rural lending, community owned products, and asset development strategies.
• Business Advisory Services: This involves various trainings including financial management, elementary book keeping, customer care, inspirational messages, among others.
• Community Investment: This comprises consumer-owned businesses, social businesses, and social investment.
• Entrepreneurial of Entrepreneurship: This involves small-business development, hands-on learning, technical know-how culminating in self-employment, and life skills development.

SSF‘s core values are enhancing their clients’ self-determination, serving as an ongoing financial resource for members, and achieving significant outreach and financial self-sufficiency.

Primarily, SSF has been setup to support government and other development partners efforts in reducing real poverty among the very poor especially women. These people live on less than $1 a day. It is not necessarily that the poor do not want to do something to improve their lives. Economic and cultural structures have caused them to develop a mindset ―SSF does not have a way out. Profit-motivated financial institutions are less inclined to help the poor, because the poor lack collateral as well as the experience of handling loans. Professor Muhammad Yunus, whose work focuses on the poorest of the poor, argues back by saying that the poor pay back their loans. He has found that the poor have their own plans, and business ideas, but they do not have access to financial services- a view agreed by SSF.