Cassava chips production for export

Entrepreneur

About Me

My name is Eric okyere Amankwah. I remember growing up in the city of Accra and attending the best of schools in the capital city of Ghana. I thought the whole country side of Ghana was like Accra until I finished my secondary education and got a job with Ghana cocoa board and was posted to a remote cocoa growing village in the western region of Ghana. There I saw how deprived and lowly lifes that farmers live and the poverty and social injustice they face as people. There was this compassion and an intense motivation to help rural folks have a new meaning to living by not altering what they do as peasant farmers but leveraging on their daily activities of farming and giving them access to the international market.
For this and more, I realized that the most common crop that is widely cultivated was cassava. My research work brought to light that out of the 14million tons cultivated annually in Ghana, only 4million tons get to be used and the rest go to waste. Learning from the Vietnam and Indonesia experience where Millions of tons are shipped to China and Europe, I set up this organisation to buy cassava from the peasant farmers and process them into cassava chips for export.

My Business

Having an off -taker for my produce and machines to process the chips sets me up to reach out to more farmers and to encourage them to plant more.
Currently we buy a ton of cassava at $35. Cassava contains 70% water so you need to process 3 tons to get 1ton dry matter. Our selling price currently is $170 per ton.
We hope to get access to finance to set up in other communities in Ghana.

Loan Proposal

I seek to use the loan to buy more cassava from farmers for production.
Going forward we hope to be able to help more farmers by paying their health insurance premiums and also invest into machinery to help farmers weed and cultivate their cassava farms without the usual hectic work in the farms.
Access to organic fertilizers for their farms will also be a priority of my organization. All in all, we hope our actions will translate into alleviating extreme poverty in rural areas of Ghana.

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