A New Day Job

And this is how every great adventure should begin…

I am unemployed. I have no car to drive and no place to call home.
And, I‘ve never felt more fortunate.

We’ll be departing tonight on a long trek to Ghana, Africa. Once in Ghana, we’ll be staying in 3-4 different locations and assigned to several different projects through Women in Progress (WIP). WIP is an organization focused on improving the lives of women by providing training and support for women-owned businesses. We'll also be helping with Global Mamas which is the fair trade branch of WIP that currently works with over 400 women to produce fair trade goods for export to the US and UK.

Here’s our tentative location schedule:
May 16th - Arrive in Accra
May 18th - Travel to Krobo
June 30th - Travel to Cape Coast
July 25th - Meet Iowa's Lutheran Church of Hope in Ho
August 10th - Travel back to Accra
September 4th - Depart to London
September 17th - Return to D.C.



While in these locations, we’ll lead the following projects:

KROBO
Glass Grinding Business - Establishing a business to provide raw material for women who handcraft glass beads used in jewelry. Currently, women must spend a lot of time cleaning and crushing recycled glass purchased from middlemen at the market. WIP hopes we can create a process to automate the glass grinding process and establish a business to sell this raw material to bead makers. By eliminating the amount of preparation involved, the women will be able to spend more time crafting the beadwork to increase their income potential. In order to complete this project, we’ll need to do market research, setup the glass grinding machine, select distribution locations, hire staff, procure raw materials, and determine overall the pricing and financial viability of the new business.

Market Research - Most of the beads sold at market are created by woman in remote villages and then are peddled by middleman who markup the beads to the end customers. Women in Progress is not sure how these middleman acquire the beads, but would like to create a direct relationship with the bead makers. Once a direct relationship is established, WIP will provide the bead makers with a living wage for their work. This process will require us to travel to several small villages to find the bead makers. After discovering these sources, we will need to determine the quality, production capacity, pricing, and logistics involved for WIP to purchase the beads directly.

CAPE COAST
Costing Epiphany Project - Due in part to foreign aid and retail price misconceptions , many women feel that Global Mamas should be paying a higher wage for their goods. The costing epiphany project will analyze this issue on a per-product basis and educate the women to help build goodwill towards WIP. To accomplish this, we will be analyzing the financials of Global Mamas to ensure the wages paid are fair, We will also be charged with educating the women on operational expenses involved with product sales. This will involve benchmarking wages with similar professions, reviewing fair trade wage guidelines, and comparing US marketplace product price points.

ACCRA
Search Engine Marketing - Global Mamas operates a website which sells the fair trade goods made by Ghana women. Goods sold through the Global Mama website have a higher profitability and WIP would like to increase the number of internet sales. We will work on making the website more likely to be found by search engines. This will also involve creating pay-per-click search engine advertising for Global Mamas. If time allows, we will provide site redesign recommendations which we may implement while back in the U.S.

eBay product store - As new goods are placed on the Global Mama website, WIP would like them to appear on eBay. We will be working on updating this process to provide an easy way to list new items.



If anyone would like to learn more about Ghana or view a map of the locations, the U.S. Department of State has a good summary at this site:

http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/cis/cis_1124.html


We'll be updating the site at least once a week with our pictures and video from the trip so stay tuned for more!