Lots of progress, still so much to do!

The last 10 days have been very exciting! My passport arrived quickly and I sent it off to the Ghanaian Embassy in DC to get my visa. I learned where I am staying (the hotel even has a laundry service!) and what I’ll be doing. And my friend Kwame (who I worked with at my first IBM job in NY) just returned from 8 weeks in Ghana, and it turns out he actually grew up in Takoradi. He’s already been a tremendous resource and I have only talked to him once.

As I write this, I depart in 16 days, wow! Our team has been doing a lot of work together (weekly calls plus reading and writing on our own) to prepare for the cultural and logistical aspects of the trip. On top of that, we are now starting to interact with the clients who will be the recipients of our services when we are in Ghana. I definitely wish we had the full 3 months to prepare, but I am also confidant that we’ll be fine despite the compressed schedule.

Obviously, the big news is that we received our Statements of Work and know where we’ll be working. Most of the team will be working on four different projects with the local chamber of commerce and industry. I expect that I’ll be helping them a little, and certainly I’ll be hearing more about their projects as time goes on. But for now, given the amount of work that needs to be done in the next few weeks, I focused on the project to which I was assigned. Ananda, Rosa, and I will be working with a 50-year old umbrella organization whose mission is to advocate for a better business climate in industrial Ghana. This nonprofit organization will have our 3-person team spending time with two different companies. My guess is that we’ll consult with each of the two companies for ~2 weeks and then present our findings and recommendations.

The first company is a young company that just exited its 2-year start-up phase and is looking for assistance to grow. I am really excited about this one, because it reminds me of some of the cool microenterprises I have seen in Africa and South America. From what I can tell so far, I think they provide training to farmers (to improve their farming practices and get better yields) and in exchange the farmers sell them the resulting produce. The company then processes those peppers and seals them in jars, and they plan to export the resulting pepper paste to what they believe is a strong European market. We have a lot more to learn, but I think that is a fair summary. Their challenges are numerous and the statement of work is very large for a two-week engagement, so we’ll have to have some discussions with them before we arrive in Ghana.

The second company is over 30 years old and enjoyed 20 years as the sole supplier of multiwall paper sacks to the largest cement company in Ghana. Since they didn’t have any competition, my sense is that they never focused on being a lean or effective company. A new kid moved on the block ~10 years ago and non-Ghana suppliers have begun exporting sacks, too. So the company is not operating at capacity and needs to do something. They have requested “a complete diagnostics of the entire business and help determine the possible options and recommend the way forward” which seems both vague and much longer than 2 weeks. My guess is that we will focus on a few key options (i.e., diversifying their product set, looking at exporting their product, building relationships with new clients, etc.).

Based on the two scenarios above, you can imagine that I am thrilled to be paired with Ananda and Rosa because they are very strong in the finance side of things. I bring a very different skill set to these projects, and I think we’ll be a good team. Anyway, we have a lot more to learn about these projects, but that’s a good start.

As a funny aside, I learned on this morning’s weekly call that IBM really does think of everything! I have traveled to places before where a coup was possible (maybe even probable, hopefully my family isn’t reading that!) and I’ve been places where the likelihood that I could get very sick was very high. I never had much of a back up plan, as you might expect. But we were informed this morning that, in the highly unlikely event that there is a political coup or natural disaster or a medical emergency, IBM already has a plan in place to evacuate us via helicopter. Gotta love a company who protects my life as best as it absolutely positively can -- better than I have even protected my own :)