Day 2: Making it work
Two interns, Cecilia Walllin and Vilgot Huhn, have been working at Ignitia for two months and are about to go back home to Sweden. Cecilia has helped with communications and Vilgot has assisted with statistical analyses. Cecilia wants to show Liisa a logotype she has created. But it is not for Ignitia. It is for a furniture-making side business that Liisa also runs. How did that come about? When would she possibly have time for that?, I ask.
"It is a business I started just to deal with the cash-flow issue. We had a serious problem with money last year and we thought different ways to quickly give us an income. There is only one type of sofa you can buy here in Accra and so I decided to design something similar to an IKEA sofa", Liisa explains. They are handmade here by Ignitia's driver who is also a carpenter. Textiles are sewn by immigrant women in a suburb of Stockholm.
"The downside is, of course, that it takes time away from concentrating on Ignitia, but I did not want to borrow money from my mum. Now I have also discovered a new type of bean that I can grow in Tamale, which would be new to Accra, so that could be an attractive product for some women in the food market, whom I know."
We meet with Esoko, who offers a technology platform and applications to organisations within the agricultural value chain. Today, they provide 20,000 farmers with a basic weather service. It is all text-based and a study made by New York University, showed that the farmers who subscribed to the service experienced a 10% increase in income. Esoko wants to know how Ignitia gets the correct location of the user and how they design the service in such a way that it won't be perceived as spam.
"We deliver the SMS at the same time each day, five days a week. The five days are not always Monday - Friday, since Friday may be a non-work day. Along the coast some communities do not work on Tuesdays, so we adapt the service to the different locations in order to avoid unwanted messages", Ignitia explains.
In the afternoon, we reach Tamale at last, after all sorts of troubles with flight and hotel reservations. This is a main hub for NGOs in Ghana, hence we are coming to meet some of the many farmer organisations that are based here
This is the second blog in IAP's new travel journal series, in which team members Ruth Brannvall and Mårten Genfors share insights, blogs and lessons learned from visiting inclusive businesses in Ghana, Kenya and Zambia.