My First Week in Ghana - Nicolas ‘07
I have just finished my first week in Africa and the few days I spent here are already full of great experiences.
I arrived Saturday 20th January in Ghana and started working on Monday 22nd. My first day enabled me to discover precisely my mission and my work environment within the West Africa Trade Hub in Accra. I have to coordinate a market study on cashew nuts in 10 West African countries, in order to increase local producers and processors’ sales. I had the chance to start traveling immediately. Indeed I left Accra on Tuesday to join Cotonou and Tchaourou in Benin where I attended to the inauguration of a cashew processing factory, in presence of a large number of important officials, such as the ambassador of Holland, the minister of commerce and industry in Benin. This was also a way for me to know more about the commodity (i.e. cashew nuts) that will keep me busy for the forthcoming months.
Then I left on Thursday to join Lagos and Ibadan in Nigeria where a national meeting of the African Cashew Alliance took place. Meeting stakeholders of the cashew industry coming from various states of Nigeria, being farmers, state ministers, and traders was a rich experience. I finally flight to Abuja, the capital of Nigeria in order to meet a USAIDS representative here.
My first impression about the project I will work on, about the people I will work with, and the travel opportunities are actually very good: I will be given interesting responsibilities, my colleagues are dynamic and very “action driven”, and I will flight to Guinea Bissau and Senegal on Friday…