Spotting business opportunities in Ghana

Every good business starts with a problem that people will pay to solve. Not a product you like, not a business your neighbour is doing, but a problem: something that wastes people’s time, costs them money, makes them anxious, or that they simply cannot get.

Where opportunities come from

Look for opportunities in five places:

Daily frustrations. Queues, unreliable deliveries, poor customer service, products that spoil quickly, things you have to travel far to buy. Every complaint you hear in a trotro is a possible business.
Waste. Ghana loses a large share of its fruit, vegetables and grain after harvest. Turning waste into value (drying, juicing, processing, better storage) is one of the biggest opportunities in agribusiness.
Imports that could be made locally. Much of what Ghanaians buy is imported, from processed foods to packaging and furniture. Local production can compete on price, freshness and speed, especially when the cedi weakens and imports become expensive.
Changes and trends. Growing cities, a young population, the spread of mobile money and smartphones, more people working in offices, and the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA, with its secretariat in Accra) all create new needs and new markets.
Your own skills and networks. What do people already ask you for help with? Who do you know? The best opportunity for you is one where you have an advantage.

African examples

Mobile money started from a simple problem: most people could not easily send money to family or pay for things without a bank account. Services like M-Pesa in Kenya and MTN MoMo in Ghana turned a phone into a wallet and changed how millions of people live and trade.

Zipline saw that health facilities in remote areas often ran out of blood and medicines because roads were slow. It began delivering medical supplies by drone in Rwanda, and later in Ghana, cutting delivery times from hours to minutes.

You do not need to build a drone company. Most successful Ghanaian SMEs solve smaller, local problems very well: a reliable school bus service, a clean chop bar near an office area, fresh vegetables delivered to restaurants.

Is it a real opportunity? Four tests

Problem: Is the problem real and painful, and do many people have it?
Payment: Will people pay to solve it, and how much? (Are they already paying for a poor solution?)
Ability: Can you deliver the solution with the skills, money and contacts you have, or can get?
Profit: After costs, is there enough left to make it worth your time?

Case: Esi’s sobolo

Esi works in an office in Madina. At lunch she noticed colleagues buying soft drinks they said were “too sweet” and imported juices that were expensive. Home-made sobolo sold by the roadside was popular but often warm and in unlabelled, reused bottles, so office workers did not trust it. Esi’s opportunity: clean, chilled, properly labelled sobolo with less sugar, delivered to offices. She scores well on all four tests: a real frustration, people already paying for drinks, a recipe her family is known for, and low ingredient costs.

Your turn

Open Worksheet 1: Opportunity Finder. List ten problems you or people around you face. Score each one from 1 to 5 on the four tests. Pick your top two and write them in Section 2 of your business plan.

Key points

Start with a problem, not a product.
Look at frustrations, waste, imports, trends and your own advantages.
Test every idea against problem, payment, ability and profit.