Customer Number 2!

In Cape Coast, right across the road from the beautiful ocean and the tall palm trees, you will find gari being sold in small bags.

Earlier on this trip, we were excited to find that Aunty Howe was able to pay the rest of the money she owed to us for the grater we sold to her last year. She officially became our first customer! This motivated us to convince more people to become our customers as we demonstrated our grater through our social engagements. We went back to the gari association we visited upon arriving to Cape Coast and this time they had electricity! We proceeded to showing them how our grater works and they gave us valuable feedback. The conversation then changed to talking about the cost of the grater, and whether anyone was interested in purchasing it.

After a constructive discussion with us about how the payment for the grater would work as well as safety precautions when using the grater, the gari association decided to invest in our grater! 

Below: Allison shaking hands with Esi - the caretaker of the grater

Below: Our happy customers waving us goodbye! 

It was a bittersweet yet wonderful moment - letting go of a grater that we all felt connected to in some way. The long team discussions about the design specifications of the grater, doubts about how the grater would be received by the gari producers, the sweat we endured under the Ghanaian heat in Suame magazine while assembling the grater, the endless arguments about what color the grater should be - In that moment, all those hardships seemed minute.  In that moment we also remembered that the success in making this purchase was not only because of our effort while in Ghana, but also the effort of the team members that worked tirelessly on the grater project back in Boston. Thank you  to Liz Threkeld and Elizabeth Poindexter, Helene Hachard and Prateek Sethi for being instrumental in the development of the grater both on the tech side and the business side. 

Poku or Cocoa?

Monday, 14^th January 2013

I had been in constant communication with Justice Nsafoah, a KNUST MBA student who Rainey and I got connected to through a visit we made to a Ghanaian Methodist Church in Worcester, Massachusetts. Richmond is Justice’s brother, and he made sure to give us Justice’s number to help us while we were in Kumasi. Indeed, Justice was extremely helpful in facilitating and setting up a meeting with Norvisi Gari Processing Association, a gari factory at Poku Transport.

In the game “Telephone”, the message the sender sends almost never gets delivered in the exact way it was intended to by the receiver. Miscommunication can be a huge barrier to any work that is trying to reach completion. So when Justice told me to meet him at Poku transport over the phone, I thought what he had said instead was “Cocoa” transport.  This posed a lot of problems because there was, in fact, a Cocoa transport and that’s where Augustin, our tro-tro driver took us. Long story short, we were half an hour late for our meeting with Justice at Poku transport.

When we arrived, we found a gari factory in full operation. Gari producers came from distant villages to grate, press, and fry their gari in this factory. 

We then carried out a live demonstration of our grater, and received positive feedback! The gari producers liked our grater better because the cassava mash that came out was smoother than their grater. 

We  left the factory in high spirits because after our demo, we received an order from a gari producer! ADE Ghana's grater is quickly becoming a highly demanded product! 

Moving to the Cape Coast

    On Tuesday morning, we packed up all of our luggage and machines in our tro-tro, leaving KNUST behind to head to the Cape Coast, the Sekondi region of Ghana. The drive was filled with African music and reading the guide book about where we were heading. When we arrived in the Cape Coast we immediately went to a gari association, their location being across the street from the ocean! We hopped out of the car and went straight to work- carrying our grater and whipping our notebooks out to take copious amounts of notes from our interview with them. We met with about 10 ladies who produce gari sometimes together and sometimes individually. We wanted to do a demonstration of our grater for them, but alas the electricity was not working. We had previously realized that nothing really goes as planned on trips like these, so we were quick to think on our feet and decided to show them a video of the grater, and start our interview. We told them that we would come back on Friday to do a demonstration (hopefully their power will be working). We got some valuable information from them such as how many times a week they grate cassava, and who they sell to (secondary schools primarily). They also asked us questions about things such as pressing and whether we could make them a pressing machine. When we told them that this machine has other uses such as making fufu (a traditional dish in Ghana), one of the women jumped up and started dancing, because she was so happy. We look forward to going back to see them on Friday to see if they are as enthusiastic about our demonstration! We are hoping to get at least one order from them!

Tuesday night we had the wonderful opportunity to eat dinner with the other Babson group that is currently in Ghana teaching entrepreneurship. It was great to share a meal and learn what each group is doing, and interact with each other thousands of miles from Boston!

Yesterday we went to a village that was very near the commercial area and pff the main road to meet with a family who does gari processing. They had a grater, and we got to see how it worked and asked them what they liked about it. The grater they were using was not the safest, but the man had a concern with our machine, because he said the cost of electricity is too high. They also had a pressing machine, but it was still very strenuous and took them a long time to use it.

Today we are taking the day to write up all of our notes that we have accumulated this past few days from interviews and to process the information we have gotten from them. We are starting a database for all of our notes so that next semester's team can have an easy time accessing our notes from this trip! It is crazy to think that we are wrapping up our trip so soon! The hard laborious work is over, but we still need to take all the information we got, and put it to good use!

**sorry that there are no pictures at the moment due to computer problems, but will try to post them soon!**

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Back to the Village

This past weekend, we took our 3 finished graters and our presses and headed to the villages to demo them. Saturday was an interesting day, as we first drove to Adumkrom, only to be told that Aunty Howe was at the farm, uprooting her cassava. So, we all got back in the Tro-Tro (Ghanaian van) and headed to PKK, only to find that the chief of the village was not present, as he was attending a funeral. With the chief not present and many of the village residents away at the funeral as well, we could not demonstrate our 3 finished graters and receive feedback. Thus, after driving a long way on bumpy dirt roads, we were forced to head back to Adum Krom and hope that Aunty Howe had come back from her cassava field.

Luckily, upon returning to Adumkrom, we were fortunate to find Aunty Howe back from the cassava field. After peeling a few pieces of cassava with her (I was complimented on my prowess with a blade), we used her grater (newly 100% paid for by her I remind you) to obtain cassava mash, which we could then press. With Aunty Howe, the ADE Ghana team tested our 3 press prototypes. From our questions and conversation, we gained more insights on the pressing process.

On Sunday, we traveled back to PKK to speak with Aunty Regina and other gari processing women in the village. We all took turns at hand-grating cassava the traditional way and then began feeding the remaining pieces of cassava into one of our motorized graters. The village residents present were quite impressed with our creation but suggested that we create a new machine that could load more cassava at a time. Nonetheless, we received 2 orders on future graters to be assembled and delivered to PKK in May. It felt great after all of our hard work in Suame to receive not just 1, but 2 orders for our graters so soon after assembling them!

-Nikhil

Shop till you drop!

Suame Magazine

Last week was a rough week for all of us- Monday through Friday, 9 A.M to 5 P.M,  whether you’re studying business or engineering, all the team members put in 110% effort into the fabrication of our graters and press prototypes at ITTU, a shop located in Suame Magazine working for our partner institution KNUST. The shop was impressive in its own way- from a gigantic hand shear with the lever arm the length of my height and the workers who can chisel faster than I can use that shear. Our goal for the week was to produce three working graters and three different press prototypes that would be used in the co-designing session with the gari producers in the village over the weekend. Even though we had most of the grater parts made at Olin and purchased the main mechanisms for the presses, the assembly of the machines required more creativity and much steeper learning curve than expected.

There were times when the 96 teeth that were punched out (times three for three graters!) individually with a sharpened masonry nail seemed to only increase in number as you go. The sun was scorching so hard that the sheet metal that was left out for barely 10 minutes became too hot to touch with bare hands. Shopping was no longer a fun ordeal but a physically strenuous chore that required intense haggling and balancing massive metal sheets on one’s head. There were times when we were genuinely concerned for the safety, not of us, but of the workers, who were welding with no type of eye or skin protection at all. But through all the chaos, greasy fingers that never seem to get properly cleaned, late night motor rewiring workshop, and many, many delicious but expensive juice boxes, we managed to get things done just in time for our village visits.

It was definitely challenging to work with half-broken-down machines that didn’t exist in a great quantity in the first place. However, a successful collaboration, both amongst ourselves and with the shop workers, kept us motivated and focused through it all. It was a valuable experience for the team to not only work together as a team under a tight deadline, but to learn to be flexible and understanding in an environment where anything can go wrong.

The grater motors after 3 hours of rewiring workshop in the dorms after a long day in the shop. More importantly, our life source, the juice box Don Simon!

Rainey, a business student from Babson, became an engineer for the week! She successfully demonstrated the prototype that she designed and built to Auntie Howe over the weekend.

Our First Village Visit

      This weekend we did a trip to some remote villages outside of Konongo, about 2 hours away. When we first got to Konongo we were able to go to some shops that sell agricultural products. We were fortunate enough to talk to a shop owner who told us about his business: what he sells, how he repairs broken machines, and if he would be interested in stocking our grater in his shop. We then went to PKK which is a village of about 3,000 people. We met a gari processor there named Regina and we were able to ask her many questions about her process and the specifics of her business model, like what her costs are, and how many bags of gari she sells in the market. As we were furiously taking down notes, and coming up with more and more questions, we could not believe how much valuable information we were getting by talking with these women.

Our morning meeting with our community liaison- Jerry

We got to interview multiple women who are gari processors and we were able to get a lot of information that we were able to use in both our design as well as our business models. We had an amazing experience meeting some amazing Ghanaian people and some inspiring women. We got to spend the night in Adumkrum, a village of only 300 people. While the adventure of sleeping on matts and under mosquito nets was fun, the best part of the night was seeing the clear night sky and seeing all of the constellations so clearly, which is not easily seen in the US.

The next day we got to check up on Auntie Howa, a woman who already is using our grater, to see how the grater is working for her. She reported to us that the grater was helping her business tremendously, and she is able to sell much more now than ever before. Also, she was able to pay us the last payment of the grater so now the grater is officially 100% hers! Our first official customer! It is amazing to see a product you worked so hard on back at Babson and Olin affect someone’s life so personally.

Auntie Howe's Grater- you can tell she uses it a lot!

This week we are working in the machine shop at Suame Magazine. I for one am very excited because I have never worked in a machine shop before, so there is much to learn and explore! We are all looking forward to making progress on both our press and grater!

Taking a Coconut Break!

Day 2 – Trekking Tek Junction Market

For many of us living in the United States, going grocery shopping is a tedious task – one that involves walking numerous aisles filled with way too many items. In Kumasi, going grocery shopping is just as tedious a task but I would say even more complicated. Haggling is a common way of going about buying food from the market, and competition is fierce among the different shops. This afternoon, on a quest to buy food items for our stay in Ghana, the ADE team went to Tek Junction market. Tek Junction market is a central shopping location located right outside KNUST. It is hard to miss – there are all sorts of little stalls and shops clustered under colorful umbrellas and shades. Shopkeepers will aggressively sell their items by calling you to their stall and try to give you a better deal than the stall next door. Dr. George Obeng (Director of TCC and friend of Ben) drove us to Tek Junction and helped us shop around the market. He was so pleasant and patient with us!

(Pictured above left to right: ShopkeeperJ, Isabelle Byusa, Alison Shin, Dr. George Obeng, Rainey Jernigan, Nikhil Gupta)

KNUST campus has a commercial center with a pharmacy, food shops, ATM machines etc. The picture above was taken outside one of the shop!

Tek Junction Market 

Tomorrow morning, we are setting off to Adumkrom and PKK – two small villages in Kumasi. We will be spending the night there and meeting with gari producers in those villages. Our goal for the visit is to gain as much solid data about gari producers as we can.  We will be going back next weekend and also bring our grater with us for live demonstrations. Some of the potential questions we will be asking to the gari producers on our trip are:

1. How much would you be willing to pay for a grater?

2. If you bought this grater, would you grate cassava for yourself or grate for others as a source of income?

3. Do you have other jobs besides cassava grating? If yes, how much time do you spend on cassava grating compared to your other jobs?

4, What would you do with the increased income of owning a grater?  

5. How much money do you make from the sale of gari?

6. What do you do with the money that you make from your business?  Do you put money back in business or other?

7. Why would you buy a grater? Why would you not buy a grater?

8. What features of the grater are important in the final quality of the gari?

9. How many people do you know who are gari producers? How likely would they be to purchase a grater?

10. Have you seen anything like our grater before?

11. Are you a part of an association?

12. How long does the whole grating and pressing process take?

Looking forward to Day 3! Stay tuned for another blog post after our village trip J

Ghana Welcomes ADE Team 2013

January 3rd, 2013

The ADE Team, pictured above (Isabelle Byusa, Nikhil Gupta, Abigail Mechtenberg, Rainey Jernigan, and Benjamin Linder), arrived in Ghana safe and sound around 1pm (Ghana time). We were greeted by the colorful entrance of the Kotoka Airport in Accra.

 The three graters + all our luggage made it to Accra! Excited to get down to business.

Alison Shin, a member of the ADE team who arrived in Ghana earlier than the rest of us welcomes the group with boxes of authentic Ghanaian food. We sure were hungry!

 Jolloff rice & chicken

After a five-hour ride in our mini-van to Kumasi, we finally arrived at our destination – Tek Credit Union Hostel, which is a residence hall in the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) campus. We then unwinded and unpacked.

Our first night consisted of eating at a restaurant at the engineering guest house which is located a few minutes away from the Tek Credit Union Hostel. On our way back, we had toads of fun! The team is looking forward to assembling the graters and introducing them to gari producers, agricultural shops and gari associations in the coming days. 

-Isabelle Byusa