Phase 2 - Day 9

I can feel us getting close to the end now! Darryl and I visited the market today. It was quite a sight! Christmas is tomorrow, so the people of Ekumdipe all gathered in this central location to buy and sell a variety of items just in time for the holiday. Of course, this represented a perfect opportunity to get the rest of the needed inputs for our financial model. After talking to the Bawku farmer, we decided to have the new farming group grow onion farms this year (relatively easy to grow and maintain). However, we still had plenty of questions about this type of crop. How do you sell onions? How much do they cost individually? How much do they cost in a bag? How much do they cost now, in March, and then in September? All of these were questions we needed to have answered. We recruited Nana, a local woman our age, to come help us determine the prices and then we went to work.

("Nana, how much does one bag of onions cost?")

Once in the market, we jumped from vegetable shop to vegetable shop in order to obtain all of our information. This was important, because we wanted to make sure our numbers were not skewed because of any particular shop. Not to mention, the Sale Ladies got annoyed and told us to move once they realized we only wanted to ask questions and not buy anything! In about 2 hours, we had the information we needed.

A bag of onions could sell for about 60 Ghana Cedis (about 40 USD) in March, at the end of the dry-season harvest. The Bawku farmer told us that one could expect to grow 30 bags of onions on one acre. We planned on starting a new 4-acre farm. Clearly it didn’t take rocket science or even financial modeling to see what kinds revenue the group of farmers could be looking at by the end of the next season. We are onto something here…

Tomorrow is Christmas! Darryl and I have hopes for getting some work done, but who are we kidding. This should be a great chance to hang out and enjoy the company of the people in the community.

-Adam