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!