Last Day in Ghana and Loan Recipients info

(THIS WAS WRITTEN THE DAY WE LEFT GHANA BUT I WAS'T ABLE TO POST IT UNTIL NOW.)

This is Joey reporting LIVE from Ghana. This is our last day in Ghana and we are sooooo sad we are leaving but also so grateful for the opportunity to come. Emily wanted me to talk a bit about the real reason we were sent to Ghana - the USU SEED program.

So SEED stands for: Small Enterprise Education and Development. Basically it means we help small businesses get up and going by teaching classes that help people prepare to start a business, then give them a small loan, then mentor them. We also had a special assignment finding contacts and gathering info about Abomosu and see what challenges and opportunities there are.

I think the SEED program will do very well in Abomosu. Those that we helped start businesses were definitely the low hanging fruit (the people ready to start businesses) but there are many more people that with a little more preparation will be able to start a successful business.

So we helped 7 businesses start/expand. They are all doing wonderful so far. Below are short descriptions of them. I hope this isn't too boring!

Esther Mensah - She was our golden child. A couple days after we arrived she showed up with a business plan (she wrote it by hand the night before), which was much more than we had expected from anyone. She wanted to start a catering and fast food business that served 3 dishes unavailable in Abomosu.
We taught her the content of our classes everyday for 9 days and then decided to fund her loan. She started her business and outperformed her projected sales by a ton! So much in fact that instead of paying off the loan in 7 months, she paid it off in 2!!! Which maybe that doesn't sound amazing, but for these people it is incredible. She is doing very well for herself (and her family).

Ben Boadu- Is starting a sugar cane farm. There is a great demand for sugar cane and not enough supply. You have to have a certain kind of land (kind of swampy) to grow sugar cane, and he had the land, so it was a good match for someone who had half the resources to start a business, and we supplied the other half.

Daniel Acheampong - (To pronounce his last name just combine Champion and pong really fast.) He operates a corn milling machine that grinds the corn into flour, but he wanted a loan to also purchase a Oil Palm extraction machine. There are lots of Oil Palm trees that produce this seed thing that contains a bunch of oil. Anywho, there is no one in town who has this extraction machine, so people extract the oil by hand by squishing it. So he'll help save a lot of people a lot of time (everyone uses this oil to cook for most meals).

Dompreh - He is the manager of his brother's pharmacy. The pharmacy lacked the capital to purchase much inventory. They were the largest pharmacy in the village (there are two others), but they still turned away 30 people a day because they did not have the medicine. So with the loan they about doubled there inventory and are very profitable. And it is helping the sick people of Abomosu.

Sampson and his Wife - Sampson's wife does not speak english, so we mostly worked with Sampson, but together they make a food called Kenkey. It the same idea as a tamale (because it is corn based and wrapped in leaves) but the corn is fermented so it tastes disgusting! But the Ghanaians love it and Sampson and his wife are known as the best Kenkey makers. Anywho, their problem is the cost of corn skyrockets between January and May, so there profit margin becomes pennies (actually Pesewas), but if they buy the corn now and hoard it away then they can be profitable year-round.

Philip Twum - He is the LDS branch president and runs a DJ business. DJs are very important to Ghanaian culture because funerals are a BIG deal. He wanted a loan so he could get some new equipment so he could DJ for two funerals at the same time. He was very grateful for the accounting and record keeping skills we taught him.

Faustina - She is probably the person who's income level will be helped the greatest. She has started a very simple business selling tomatoes and onions to her little part of the village. She goes to a town a few hours away to purchase her inventory. Her loan amount was the smallest at GHC200 (about $140).

I can not even begin to describe how wonderful of a learning experience this was. I really feel like we helped these people a lot and helped start something wonderful in Abomosu. We also made some wonderful friends. To avoid making this extremely long I will sum it up and say that I am grateful our Father in Heaven blessed us with this opportunity to learn, grow, and develop.