From understanding why parents pushed their children into white collar jobs instead of farming because weeding was used as punishment in school making people grow up thinking farming is for those who cannot read and write to learning the brutal truth that we import 100 million dollars worth of tomatoes from Burkina Faso every year and if a young person can target just 1% of that market that's one million dollars in opportunity but the 25 year old guy doesn't know where to get 50,000 cedis to start and banks are not willing to co-invest because they get high returns from government bonds instead of taking equity in startups proving that there's a big industry in Ghana about talking on problems every day but nothing is done and we need to move from talking to working on the ground, the entrepreneur whose grandparents were big cocoa farmers in Ofori area and grew up on cocoa farms but was pushed into education because parents wanted their children to become doctors or engineers so they could tell their friends my son is a doctor my daughter is a pilot instead of saying my child is a farmer which doesn't bring societal respect or dignity in Ghana today, the reality that when you go to the UK or Japan or USA or Brazil the rich people are farmers milking cows and doing large scale agriculture but in Ghana we've pushed agriculture to the background and left farming for peasant farmers working on one acre or one plot of land feeding their children with agriculture extension officers advising them instead of thinking about large scale farms, the wisdom that education is very very important but we need to revamp the way we teach people because when he was growing up they punished you and asked you to go and weed so you grew up thinking weeding is a form of punishment and farming is exaggerated punishment so people are not going to do it and the farmer cannot even send his son to school, the vision that if we are able to revamp the way we teach and explain agriculture to people they will get to know that you can be a PhD and till the ground and make a lot of money because you can identify a problem like importing tomatoes from Burkina Faso and supply the ladies who are going to buy those tomatoes creating jobs and wealth, the fish farmer who started Wadicair Farms in 2023 with 2.5 million US dollars investment now doing revenues of maybe 750,000 cedis yearly and growing because 2023 was virtually zero but 2024 and 2025 are looking better with more people patronizing the products and off-takers coming from Canada Germany Ivory Coast and locally selling to Max Mart Talegon Max Mart La Bony and Focus Trading in Kumasi, the product innovator who created oven dried sliced catfish instead of just the traditional curled catfish because growing up mothers would finish the soup and have to divide the fish and it's hard when it's curled so slicing it makes it easier for them to give portions to children while the father gets the big curled one but initially people asked where is the head how do I know this is not snake so now they include the head and people are buying the sliced version, the employer who tells his workers you are here not just for a salary because if we make money in this company Kwame is not going to just keep it to himself and his family but will set up a bonus system so workers can get sizeable bonuses to buy blocks and start building something for their families because they live around the village and he wants them to build generational wealth too, the businessman whose motivation for starting the farm was money of course because it's not philanthropy but he doesn't have to squeeze money out of his people and if he can make decent profits selling at 100 why should he sell at 150 or 200 when he has his targets and knows where the business is going.
Host: Derrick Abaitey
UK