Business Opportunities in Ghana for Americans

Tooie, maybe you might be the best person to talk about this because you aren't both sides on the American side and the Ghanaians, so for people that have not been the Ghana or not familiar. The reason why we personally invested our time in the GE resources into Ghana, we just felt Ghana had a few things that was in its favor. A, it's safe.

Right? That's important. So from a security standpoint, you want to go to a country that you actually feel safe, and this is anywhere in the world, right? So we've been all over the map, and you kind of know when you're in dangerous areas, and you kind of know when you're in the area that you feel comfortable in. So God is a safe country, and it has a state of government.

And that's important too. Unfortunately, especially in Africa, government has been a major issue. And that's for a variety of different reasons, but that's neither here nor there. But Ghana is one of these countries that

has transitions of power. They don't have military cools happening every three years. So that's important. You invest somewhere. You want to know that there's never going to be a perfect government. But at least there's no civil unrest that happens every other week. That's something that is not sustainable for investment, especially for foreign investment, because you don't know what's going on. So that works in its favor.

But talk about your transition as far as an American going to Ghana, even though you're from Ghana originally, but because the health care system, all of that kind of just walk us through your personal experience. Yeah, no. My experience, it's interesting, because I sometimes tell people you get the culture shock twice, right? Because I was born in the US, and then I moved to Ghana when I was seven. There was an adjustment, even though I was getting in.

By blood, there was an adjustment in just being American and now trying to plug into the to the Ghanaian kind of school system. And then I came back to the US for college. There was an adjustment. And then going back to Ghana, you don't realize like how much you kind of evolved doing your your formative years. But it wasn't adjustment to start out, but tremendous amount of opportunity because

you know, climate touch on the business environment. I actually moved back to Ghana in 2019 to join a small holding company. And at the time, like, you know, we had three restaurants in our portfolio, right? Fast forward to today, you know, five, five, six years later.

We have upwards of 150 where one of the largest franchisees for Pinkberry across the world, right? And this is just in Ghana. And so very quickly, I was able to kind of adjust to the dynamics of working and living in Ghana, because although our institutions are nascent,

processes work. If you want to set up a company, there's a structure that you can follow to be able to do that, people to support and assist you all across the board. And then, you know, from quality of life standpoint, like quality of life in Ghana is really high, especially if you're

you know, someone of middle income, upper middle class, like there are certain things you can have access to. You have, you know, additional support, whether it's, you know, nannies at home to kind of support with upkeep. The healthcare infrastructure is really strong. We invest in significant amounts of money, the government, private sector into enhancing our healthcare systems. When you look at Ghana from

kind of a social perspective like everyone talks about dirty december and like the year we go to party but the social scene extends beyond that right there's movie theaters and golf courses and pickleball and all these nice kind of restaurants that you can partake in and then on the cultural side you know there's

a whole bunch of natural kind of whether you want to go on hikes or you want to go to the the cocoon forest or you want to go to the Cape Coast castles or you want to partake in in like a cultural dance trail. There's just so much richness to Ghana from a social standpoint that even goes beyond just

you know, the parties that a lot of people will see on Instagram. And so for me, it was like, that range just allowed me to kind of plug back in and really start to assimilate again. And I think, you know, when people are thinking about Ghana as a place, can I live here, right? Like everything from our health care to the education system, like right now from a tech standpoint, you got a lot of people working remotely.

out in Ghana because quality of internet is there, right? We have 5D internet in Ghana too. There's Elon Musk's Starlink that you can plug in too just to make sure you have access to your Zoom meetings and Microsoft Teams. And so I think it's one of the themes where people feel like Africa can be distant and daunting, but

stay connected to folks who've been there, come as a tourist first, and you'll see that it's a high quality of life that you can easily assimilate. Well, too, we talk about your specific journey as far as, like you said, you're one of the biggest franchisee, you have one of the biggest, you know, food chains in Ghana, in the whole private continent. So, talk about, like, just talk about that as far as your entrepreneurial journey going there, like, what was the steps that you took to get up and running, like, kind of walking through that?

Yeah, so my thought process was, I've always known that I was an entrepreneur at heart. You know, I was a kid in middle school and high school who, you know, back in Ghana would buy all these U.S. for rollups, rice, crispy treats, all these snacks and sell it to my classmates. So I've always had that entrepreneurial spirit.

And so when I was starting to think about going back to Ghana, my preference was to do it through what's called entrepreneurship through acquisition. So I found a partner who had set up a food business. They only had three locations at the time and just started working together as partners. And we said, hey, we want to stay opportunistic, right? And our thesis was literally

Ghana is a very nascent market with a lot of opportunity. 60% of our population is under the age of 25 and the middle class is growing at an unprecedented rate. And so we knew people will always need food. So we started off in food service and really trying to scale kind of what is, you know, quick service, fast casual restaurants and our thesis was, hey, we would get some of these Western brands and learn their processes

and then implement it to scale up some of our local brands. And so now we have both, right? We have the franchise for Burger King and Pinkberry, but we also have local brands in Do-Man foods and Chicken Man, and collectively are the largest restaurant operator in Ghana.

We've continued to stay opportunistic and now have a presence in actually 14 different African countries covering food service. We also do financial services where you provide kind of small business financing for people at the bottom of the pyramid. We have a gaming platform that effectively provides software for

media houses to run raffles. So we actually partnered with Alvin and Kwame to run one of our raffles kind of through their media house and then real estate. So both commercial and residential and so partner with Alvin and Kwame on Samba to do on the residential side.

And then on the commercial side, we also have a bunch of properties in Tanzania. And so it's been interesting to kind of first come to Ghana, but realize that the opportunity for growth extends beyond just Ghana and taking that risk going to some of these other different markets. So across West Africa, East Africa, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, we're in Malawi, Mozambique, Sierra Leone,

We're working on Senegal and Guinea. It's been fun, man. And I always extend myself as a resource for people who are looking to navigate because I think first you need someone who, something to chase or someone who's had the success you're looking for and then just kind of leverage those partnerships to deepen your presence and figure out where you can also add value.