Three entrepreneurs tapping into Ghana’s farming potential

Nana Owusu-Achau is the founder of rice producer Agro Kings.

By cultivating rice, processing shea nuts, and drying fruit, these three entrepreneurs are tapping into Ghana’s agricultural potential.

1. Entrepreneur grows rice brand to over $1m in annual sales

Entrepreneur Nana Owusu-Achau is the founder of Agro Kings, a Ghana-based company that produces the Nana’s Rice brand, among other food products. Last year, the business sold over $1 million worth of rice.

Owusu-Achau was born and raised in Ghana but completed his university degree in the US. He secured a position at a Wall Street firm after graduation but chose to return to Ghana. In 2012, he joined his father’s real estate business and, the following year, started his own property firm.

In 2017, on his way to a property project in a rural area, a local chief handed Owusu-Achau some rice grown by smallholder farmers in the region. Impressed by the quality after cooking it at home, he saw a potential business opportunity. He decided to support two small-scale farmers by providing them with financing, seeds, and training (offered by another organisation) to produce high-quality rice. His plan was to keep some for personal use and sell the rest, sharing the profits with the farmers.

After the first harvest, the farmers delivered Owusu-Achau’s share and assured him that the rest would come after a middleman sold the rice at the market. Realising he could bypass the middleman, he decided to sell the rice himself. Using basic packaging, he promoted the rice to his WhatsApp contacts and sold all his stock within two hours. “That’s when I saw we have a business,” he recalls.

With growing demand, Owusu-Achau expanded his operations, increasing the number of farmers in his network to 25. By this stage, he was still primarily focused on his real estate ventures.

To scale up production, Owusu-Achau began the process of acquiring land for Agro Kings in 2019. The property, located in Kasunya, about two hours from central Accra, includes 350 acres dedicated to the company’s commercial farming operations. The remaining land is leased to over 300 small-scale farmers who supply their harvest to Agro Kings. The company now works with around 5,000 small-scale farmers, both on and off its property.

Watch our full in-depth interview with Nana Owusu-Achau

2. There’s global demand for Ghana’s shea nuts: This CEO saw an opportunity

Dora Torwiseh, CEO of the oilseed processing company Nuts for Growth, has capitalised on the potential of shea nuts, which are indigenous to Africa. Global demand for shea butter, extracted from these nuts, is projected to exceed $3.5 billion by 2028, driven by its applications in personal care products like lotions and moisturisers, as well as food items such as chocolates and ice cream. In northern Ghana, shea trees grow predominantly in the wild, with women harvesting the nuts that fall to the ground.

Torwiseh grew up in Tumu in Ghana’s Upper West region, a community characterised by small-scale farming, widespread poverty, and limited economic opportunities. Despite these challenges, the region had a valuable resource – shea nuts – which many residents, including Torwiseh’s family, gathered and sold on a small scale.

Despite the modest scale of her family’s shea nut activities, it provided enough income to send Torwiseh to school. After completing her education, she secured corporate jobs in the capital, Accra, working for companies like Nestlé. However, she found little fulfilment in these jobs, increasingly troubled by the hardships her community continued to face. Recognising the untapped potential of shea nuts, she left her position, determined to elevate the shea industry in her region.

The sector faced significant challenges, particularly the lack of large-scale aggregation among nut collectors, which limited interest from international buyers seeking substantial quantities. In response, Torwiseh began organising local shea nut pickers to streamline collection efforts. Her next hurdle was finding a market for the nuts. She started by sending samples to global buyers, but securing clients was a slow and arduous process.

Persistence paid off when she secured a Dutch buyer, now part of US agribusiness giant Bunge, which remains a major client of Nuts for Growth. Today, the company connects over 80,000 women with international clients, including other major buyers like American commodities giant Cargill.

Read our full interview with Dora Torwiseh

3. Businessman builds company exporting dried fruit from West Africa to Europe

Hans Peter Werder established HPW in 1997, exporting fresh pineapples from Ghana to Europe. Today, HPW is one of the largest producers of naturally dried mango, pineapple and coconut in Africa, with operations in Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire and Kenya.

In an earlier interview with How we made it in Africa, Werder described how he entered the industry:

“I got into the agriculture business somewhat by chance. In 1996, I was working in marketing at a company producing jam and other processed food items in Switzerland when I got a call from a friend asking if I could help him sell air-freighted pineapples from Ghana to customers in Europe.

“Initially, we weren’t very successful, as most of the big retailers already had suppliers of pineapples. But when I came to Ghana I tasted how delicious the pineapple was fresh from the farm. The idea came up to cut and package the fresh fruit in Ghana and export it on a daily basis. Cutting them in Ghana allowed us to work with fully ripe fruit fresh from harvesting, and offer the customers in Europe much fresher, sweeter pineapple.

“We started working with Blue Skies, which at that time was a young fruit processing company in Ghana, and exported to the Coop supermarket in Switzerland. They liked the fresh-cut pineapple enough to trial it in 60 stores. It was a lot of hard work, visiting all the stores and making sure the cold chain was in place from the factory to the shelf, but it went very well and that was the start for HPW.

“In 2004, one of the farms in our network became the first fair trade certified pineapple farm in the world, which brought a huge increase in demand in the UK. We sent our first agronomist, Maik Blaser, to Ghana that year. He did a tremendous job helping to grow the farms in our network, helping build infrastructure and helping more farms to reach fair trade certification.

“By 2007 we were the largest pineapple exporter in Ghana, exporting about 20 containers (320 tonnes) of pineapple per week.”

Read our full interview with Hans Peter Werder 

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