Ludicrous.

Absolutely ludicrous.

On Thursday I attended a women's business summit in Accra. The summit consisted of a series of workshops decided to increase the competitiveness of small and medium enterprises owned by women in Ghana. The summit had good goals, but as they say the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Despite having major corporate sponsors such as ExxonMobil, Nestle, and Coca-Cola, the organizers still charged GHC 50 for entry. That is almost a month's wage for most people in this country, and is the average size of a microloan. They also charged GHC 15 for lunch, as well as GHC 200 for some women to rent stands to display their wares.

They rented a very expensive auditorium (the National Theater) and it was only 1/4 full. Great job guys!

One workshop that I sat through involved "Improving your Corporate Social Responsibility". CSR is not a pressing issue among women-owned SME's here, and is certainly low on the priority list (unlike, say, reliable power connections).

The main issue that the 2-day summit intended to address was high interest rates. The average rate on microloans here is 72%! Corporate loan rates are 40-60%. A panel discussion was held with advocates, investors, a central bank official, and a leading economist in Accra. The discussion was a good one to have (basically everyone ripping on the guy from the central bank) but it became far too technical for the intended audience, and inappropriate given that no real solutions were given for the women's problems.

The central bank's stance was that the women could just negotiate with the bankers (Ha!) and that rates were high because the "risk free" ghanaian t-bill rates were high. And because t-bill yields were high (28%), the prime rate had to be high (18.5%). Clearly a bond yielding 28% isnt a risk free asset, but hey, what do I know? I'm just a dumb obruni.

The excursion to Aburi was fun, if a little short. We arrived in Aburi to discover that our hotel was overbooked, which meant that check out time on Sunday morning was 6:00am. We found another hotel with availability, but that hotel turned out to be significantly more expensive. Aburi is only an hour from Accra, so I decided to just come home on Saturday night.

After check-in at the hotel we decided to order lunch; after which we would go to the botanical gardens and then do a short bike ride. Unfortunately it took the hotel over 2 1/2 hours to serve all of us lunch. While we were waiting, we were treated to fresh palm wine. The hotel's owner had chopped down a palm tree, and had just put a tap in to extract the wine. It was delicious!
We didn't have enough time to do both events, so we opted to go on a longer bike ride.

I should note that I have not been on a bicycle in about 10 years, and that bicycle was a single speed. I was having a lot of issues getting started and used to both the gearing and braking. During the intial phase of the ride through Aburi I became separated from the others - big mistake. Not only were we the only obruni in the town, we were a convoy of 8 obruni on bicyles. The heckling started out a bit much, but became overwhelming when I fell behind. One nice man tried to encourage me to peddle harder. Everyone else was either laughing, yelling, or running me off the road. The ride got a lot better once we moved on to the bike trail and once I discovered the wonderful invention that is first gear.

It was a lot harder than I thought it was going to be. I had a hard time maintaining forward momentum. It seemed that everytime I got a good rhythm going, I would have to stop for a rock or tree branch, or I would slip and fall off the bike (that happened 4 times). I survived the whole trail, which was about 12 kilometers long. I did get to see a side of rural Ghana that I probably would not have seen otherwise.

The other volunteers want to go on a longer bicycle ride: 64 kilometers in two days. I think I'll stay in Accra that weekend.

pictures!

http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/album.php?aid=28245&id=1628075351
http://picasaweb.google.com/bigpoppanils/Aburi