Day 3 & 4 in Ghana

By Stephanie Cohen
Photos by Chris Frank

After shedding our winter woolens for our summer linens, we were off and running to our various clients, which had me and my team heading to Emefa Jewelry, to meet David and Mohammed, the two clients we had exchanged numerous e-mails, phone calls and Skype calls with over the past seven weeks. Emefa is a 45 minute drive outside of the capital city of Accra. After we toured the store, met David’s staff and were shown the workshop where each and every piece of jewelry is handcrafted, David took my team out to lunch at a newly opened restaurant down the street from his store. We attempted to enjoy some of the local flavor: red red, fufu and jollof rice, but were told our choices consisted of grilled chicken with fried rice or grilled chicken with fried rice…so, grilled chicken with fried rice it was! Lunch was delicious and we were able to find out more about David: his family, where he has traveled, his views on American politics and of course we chatted about the prior evening’s soccer match on television. Later that afternoon we went to the University of Ghana campus to meet an Entrepreneurship professor, which David had arranged for us. We gained insight into the classroom experience, how students spend their days on-campus, and, from a professor’s viewpoint, what life at home is like for college-age Ghanaians. My evening ended with a group dinner at a nearby Indian restaurant, which gave me the opportunity to hear about my friends’ day, talk to them about what I had experienced and learned and left us eager to begin work the next day.

Little did we know when we departed the hotel on Wednesday morning, David would be putting us to work in his shop! While we were chatting with one of the sales people in the store about customers’ purchasing trends, one of the silversmiths came in with a freshly finished silver cuff bracelet. He immediately requested additional sterling silver pellets in their raw form to get started on his next piece and it was at that time we saw how a pellet becomes a silver bracelet! After raw silver was weighed, recorded and handed off to the silversmith, we followed him into the workshop area to watch him melt it down and pour it into a mold to begin stretching the material out in order to begin the design process. Many hours filled with manipulating the metals with heat, filing the pieces down and carving traditional symbols result in the beautiful handcrafted pieces customers see on display at Emefa. In the picture, I am working with a scrap piece of copper, I opted for them to let me fiddle with the inexpensive materials, but Nicole who is pictured talking with David, was lucky enough to fire up a gold ring.

Our goal for the day was to meet with local university students in order to test the assumptions we had come up with in Bloomington. Much to our surprise we met with the Dean of Students who placed a call to the student body president to round up a sample set of students for us to chat with and in a matter of fifteen minutes, we were conducting informational interviews with over thirty undergraduate students. After an hour on campus, we left with copious notes and were whisked away to another university, International Professional Studies, where we met with ten graduate students studying business. We were able to learn more about their internet and purchasing habits, their favorite celebrities, as well as where they purchase clothing, jewelry and music. Soon the tables were turned and the students were asking us about everything from what a US MBA program is like to how we get internships and jobs to the price of a laptop. We finished the afternoon with David at Chez Afrique, where we finally enjoyed some of the traditional meals we attempted to eat the day before. Over the next couple of days we are looking forward to synthesizing all of the information we have acquired over the last couple of days in order to prepare our client deliverable and begin refining our presentation, which will be here before we know it, next Tuesday.