Food Processing - Welcome to the shop!

Day 1

Today is our first day working at ITTU! After a good breakfast of whole wheat toast, egg pancakes with scallion, tea and Milo chocolate energy drink, we met our program manager here in Ghana, a female engineer who studied agriculture engineering at KNUST. She hugged each of us and welcomed us with her stunning smile. It took us about 30 mins to drive from our hotel to ITTU (short for Intermediate Technology Transfer Unit), located in the Suame Magazine area, where metal workers and car mechanics are concentrated in a village. ITTU is a KNUST machine shop that produces and assembles our machines. On arriving, we met all of our partners who help us fabricate the machines there. Their open friendliness and happiness to see us made all of us smile. It felt like they have already known us because we work on the same project, even though most of us have never met before, and we started meaningful conversations right away.

The entrance to ITTU in Suame Magazine

Then, we started work by making a list of technical and business tasks as well as planning a community visit.

Then, after lunch we assigned tasks to each of us and started on some of them. The business team discussed updating pricing of the machines and the customer relationship management system. The technical team started unpacking all of the tools we brought from the US, as well as press fitting some bearing adapters into bearings using the local press, and asking a senior ITTU fabricator to broach more inserts.The plan for tomorrow is to build a reference machine for a new grater design. With all of the new fixtures, we can speed up this process substantially.

            The fixtures, parts and tools we brought to Ghana with us all unpacked

Day 2

Today we made lots of progress on both the business and tech side. The business students discussed a plan to incorporate in Ghana and a potential funding partnership to support the machine owners. They also finished updating the Customer Relationship Management (CRM). The tech team trained the fabricators at ITTU to use the templates and newly designed features. They also debugged the broaching method for bearing adapters and tried a new method. We also explored the basement space downstairs that we want to move into. 

In the afternoon, we were distracted from work by a variety of local food, brought by women who carried them on their heads. First we had mangos grown at our shop manager’s house and ball fruit (fried dough in the shape of a ball), then we drank juice from an entire green coconut and also ate the fruity inside. One of our partner fabricator also offered us his daily snack, a local specialty: tiger nuts that taste like coconut but looks like peanuts.

One of our partner fabricators, holding a bag of sweet peanuts that he offered to us to try