Nana Owusu-Achau is the founding father of rice producer Agro Kings.
By cultivating rice, processing shea nuts, and drying fruit, these three entrepreneurs are tapping into Ghana’s agricultural potential.
1. Entrepreneur grows rice model to over $1m in annual gross sales
Entrepreneur Nana Owusu-Achau is the founding father of Agro Kings, a Ghana-based firm that produces the Nana’s Rice model, amongst different meals merchandise. Final yr, the enterprise offered over $1 million price of rice.
Owusu-Achau was born and raised in Ghana however accomplished his college diploma within the US. He secured a place at a Wall Avenue agency after commencement however selected to return to Ghana. In 2012, he joined his father’s actual property enterprise and, the next yr, began his personal property agency.
In 2017, on his strategy to a property mission in a rural space, a neighborhood chief handed Owusu-Achau some rice grown by smallholder farmers within the area. Impressed by the standard after cooking it at house, he noticed a possible enterprise alternative. He determined to help two small-scale farmers by offering them with financing, seeds, and coaching (supplied by one other organisation) to supply high-quality rice. His plan was to maintain some for private use and promote the remaining, sharing the income with the farmers.
After the primary harvest, the farmers delivered Owusu-Achau’s share and guaranteed him that the remaining would come after a intermediary offered the rice on the market. Realising he may bypass the intermediary, he determined to promote the rice himself. Utilizing fundamental packaging, he promoted the rice to his WhatsApp contacts and offered all his inventory inside two hours. “That’s after I noticed now we have a enterprise,” he recollects.
With rising demand, Owusu-Achau expanded his operations, growing the variety of farmers in his community to 25. By this stage, he was nonetheless primarily targeted on his actual property ventures.
To scale up manufacturing, Owusu-Achau started the method of buying land for Agro Kings in 2019. The property, positioned in Kasunya, about two hours from central Accra, contains 350 acres devoted to the corporate’s industrial farming operations. The remaining land is leased to over 300 small-scale farmers who provide their harvest to Agro Kings. The corporate now works with round 5,000 small-scale farmers, each on and off its property.
Watch our full in-depth interview with Nana Owusu-Achau
2. There’s international demand for Ghana’s shea nuts: This CEO noticed a possibility
Dora Torwiseh, CEO of the oilseed processing firm Nuts for Progress, has capitalised on the potential of shea nuts, that are indigenous to Africa. International demand for shea butter, extracted from these nuts, is projected to exceed $3.5 billion by 2028, pushed by its purposes in private care merchandise like lotions and moisturisers, in addition to meals objects corresponding to goodies and ice cream. In northern Ghana, shea timber develop predominantly within the wild, with ladies harvesting the nuts that fall to the bottom.
Torwiseh grew up in Tumu in Ghana’s Higher West area, a neighborhood characterised by small-scale farming, widespread poverty, and restricted financial alternatives. Regardless of these challenges, the area had a priceless useful resource – shea nuts – which many residents, together with Torwiseh’s household, gathered and offered on a small scale.
Regardless of the modest scale of her household’s shea nut actions, it supplied sufficient earnings to ship Torwiseh to high school. After finishing her training, she secured company jobs within the capital, Accra, working for corporations like Nestlé. Nonetheless, she discovered little fulfilment in these jobs, more and more troubled by the hardships her neighborhood continued to face. Recognising the untapped potential of shea nuts, she left her place, decided to raise the shea trade in her area.
The sector confronted vital challenges, significantly the shortage of large-scale aggregation amongst nut collectors, which restricted curiosity from worldwide patrons looking for substantial portions. In response, Torwiseh started organising native shea nut pickers to streamline assortment efforts. Her subsequent hurdle was discovering a marketplace for the nuts. She began by sending samples to international patrons, however securing shoppers was a gradual and arduous course of.
Persistence paid off when she secured a Dutch purchaser, now a part of US agribusiness large Bunge, which stays a significant shopper of Nuts for Progress. Right now, the corporate connects over 80,000 ladies with worldwide shoppers, together with different main patrons like American commodities large Cargill.
Read our full interview with Dora Torwiseh
3. Businessman builds firm exporting dried fruit from West Africa to Europe
Hans Peter Werder established HPW in 1997, exporting contemporary pineapples from Ghana to Europe. Right now, HPW is likely one of the largest producers of naturally dried mango, pineapple and coconut in Africa, with operations in Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire and Kenya.
In an earlier interview with How we made it in Africa, Werder described how he entered the trade:
“I obtained into the agriculture enterprise considerably by probability. In 1996, I used to be working in advertising at an organization producing jam and different processed meals objects in Switzerland after I obtained a name from a buddy asking if I may assist him promote air-freighted pineapples from Ghana to prospects in Europe.
“Initially, we weren’t very profitable, as many of the massive retailers already had suppliers of pineapples. However after I got here to Ghana I tasted how scrumptious the pineapple was contemporary from the farm. The concept got here as much as minimize and package deal the contemporary fruit in Ghana and export it every day. Chopping them in Ghana allowed us to work with totally ripe fruit contemporary from harvesting, and provide the purchasers in Europe a lot more energizing, sweeter pineapple.
“We began working with Blue Skies, which at the moment was a younger fruit processing firm in Ghana, and exported to the Coop grocery store in Switzerland. They appreciated the fresh-cut pineapple sufficient to trial it in 60 shops. It was loads of onerous work, visiting all of the shops and ensuring the chilly chain was in place from the manufacturing unit to the shelf, nevertheless it went very properly and that was the beginning for HPW.
“In 2004, one of many farms in our community turned the primary truthful commerce licensed pineapple farm on this planet, which introduced an enormous enhance in demand within the UK. We despatched our first agronomist, Maik Blaser, to Ghana that yr. He did an incredible job serving to to develop the farms in our community, serving to construct infrastructure and serving to extra farms to achieve truthful commerce certification.
“By 2007 we have been the most important pineapple exporter in Ghana, exporting about 20 containers (320 tonnes) of pineapple per week.”
Read our full interview with Hans Peter Werder