small small businesses

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about businesses and entrepreneurs. What are the characteristics of an entrepreneur? How do you find an entrepreneur? What is a successful business model? What do small businesses in Ghana look like? What kind of support do they need to grow? What type of support can development organizations provide? Should development organizations support entrepreneurs at all?

I'm still working on figuring out the answers to all of these questions but maybe I'll let you come up with your own conclusions from hearing about two people I met in the Volta Region…

Gifty

While staying in Adidome, I woke up to the smell of freshly baked cake. Every morning, Gifty, the girl who I shared the room with, makes fifty or so muffin sized cakes in her local coal-fired oven. In catering school, Gifty learned how to make all sorts of local dishes and also more special treats like plantain chips, biscuits and meat pie. For a while, she was running a small food stall in a town not far from Adidome but the work was hard and the profit was too small so she decided to try something closer to home. Nowadays, her little sister goes around town with a wooden box on her head each afternoon after school selling the little treats. Even though each of them is only 20 pesewas (20 cents) and the ingredients are expensive, she makes some small money at the end of the day. Gifty knows that the trick is buying things in bulk but she doesn’t have enough capital to buy more than enough for one batch of cake.


Making cake (the metal box with the coal on top is Gifty’s oven)


Emma

Emmanuel is the entrepreneur I visited at Adidome. He is also what I envision a social entrepreneur to be like. His eCARE centre has been running for less than a year and it recently got expanded to a small internet café. Emma is 21, a full-time university student, and one year away from completing a degree in business administration. After visiting an eCARE centre by chance and asking the owner about the project, he decided to take the risk of applying for an eCARE centre himself. He says that he saw an opportunity to learn how business works in real life. In order to make it to the training session, he had to miss a couple of days of classes right before exams and get his classmates to catch him up. Now he is teaching them about what he has learned from owning his own shop.


The things that I like about Emma are his vision and motivation. Emma has plans to complete his MBA and continue doing business in his hometown after he graduates. Running the centre from Accra has not been easy as he has to travel often to Adidome to check on his brother Junior who works at the centre when he is gone. Luckily, Junior has taught himself how to use the computer and he keeps good records for Emma to check when he is around. In the months when business is not good and he is not able to make the monthly payment, he has to either ask his parents or take money from his own pocket despite his already tight student budget. But so far, he has not defaulted in any payments.

The first day I was visiting I witnessed a friend of Emma’s do the networking for the two second-hand computers he had bought. Later that day, a man came in asking about the newly installed internet. The smile with which Emma greeted him is what makes me think he is the right type of person to own an eCARE centre (or any business at all for that matter).

Emma