Help 25 Ghanaian women create jobs where they live

When asked to tell us a bit about herself, Enyonam Dediwo bursts into a humble, enthusiastic giggle. She takes her time recovering from her fit of laughter in true Ghanaian form, feeling no particular rush to provide her answer to the question just then. Once she’s composed herself, she proceeds to enlighten and impress us with her story.

Enyonam moved to Anloga when she was 6 years old from the Eastern Region of Ghana. She has lived in this area since, raising her first born girl, 11, and two boys, 7 and 3, along with her husband Ahadzi, a Sr. High School teacher in the nearby town of Sogakope. Enyonom has already come a long way since becoming a Lumana client only one year ago as a member of the Morkporkpor (Anloga) Cooperative, but she’s an ambitious businesswoman and from the sounds of it, she’s got a lot more cooking.

Enyonam started Amenuveve Cold Store 5 years ago. In Ghana, cold stores are where you purchase frozen goods, usually meat and/or ice cream. Enyonam happens to provide an assortment of meats, such as beef, chicken, sardines, salmon and her best seller, the local favorite fish, tilapia. In addition to running her cold store, she sells meat out of a pan that she carries to the market occurring every 4 days, in order to reach out to more customers. She’s even a seamstress on the side! Her real focus, however, is on growing her cold store business. Enyonam travels once or twice per week to Tema, an outskirt of the capitol Accra, to buy these various meats and transport them back home. Roughly two or three hours away, depending on the condition of your mode of transport, Tema is the nearest city with a fish farm where she can pick up crates of tilapia.

Before joining Lumana, Enyonam was only able to buy a crate or two of tilapia with each trip she took to Tema to restock her supply, but with her loan and the business education provided, she is now able to buy ten to fifteen crates with each trip. In order to get her load home, she has to charter a car from the fish farm to the main road and take a long trotro (mini-bus) ride back to Anloga before her fish can be inspected and placed in one of her two freezers. Since the fish are crated, she is unable to inspect quality until she finishes her day-long business trip, so buying higher quantities ensures she’ll have the inventory after picking out any product that has spoiled. This risk is a constant challenge, as well as battling the seasonality of the market for fresh fish. Her loan provides her the initial capital to make these trips to Tema far more profitable and, coupled with what she’s learned from her three-day business education course, she is growing her cold store business with a plan.

She informed us that her most valuable take away from the class was goal setting by designating a specific future purchase to save toward for expansion, as well as having a separate pot for personal savings goals. Enyonam took this advice and ran with it. She now has both short and long term goals for business and personal savings. Regarding her business, she is pursuing the short-term goal of buying even larger quantities of the meat she currently sells to ensure her customers have the best selection in town. Her 3-5 year goal, by no means a cheap purchase, is to save for a third, larger freezer, which she can purchase in Accra for 1,700 GHC and fill to the brim with meat. As for personal savings goals, she hopes to set aside money to build a home for her family and plans to start an emergency savings fund in the near future.

At the end of the day, when this industrious woman of many talents has turned in to spend time with her family, you can find her cheering along the sidelines of her husband and childrens’ football scrimmage (no, not the kind with the pigskin) in the sand just outside their home or resting as the Ghanaian sun descends and offers a short break from the grueling heat. Her outlook is good. Her daughter wants to become a nurse. Her oldest son, a banker. With the example she now sets, accomplishing goals such as these are certainly in the cards, and her newfound financial stability will ensure their higher education is possible.