Today was our first class! Natalie did most of the talking and planning for today, given her experience and the fact that I've just gotten over some sort of disease. She did an excellent job and the students responded very well!
First, we did the 7 solutions exercise. When generating problems, it was so interesting to hear the issues the students worried about - it was a great perspective about why some MNEs would seem silly in this context. One of the problems I was unaware of was that although people have postal codes here, they are often inaccurate and can result in things being delivered to the wrong community. This is a huge issue for businesses here, but the students identified some interesting stakeholders like Amazon, the government and individuals who want to sell things from their homes and receive payment by mail. Another problem identified was marketing in small towns - which was interesting because we couldn't find any blanket solutions that addressed the populations who weren't online, and covered all the different languages spoken across Ghana.
We have some entrepreneurs in our class who thought that the pitch competition was today and came with amazing ideas. One student is working on the software that connects all the hospitals in Ghana onto one cloud system. Another, has made educational films which he sells tickets to and wants to use the money to print CDs so he can add another revenue stream. I thought it was interesting to see how relevant social businesses are here.
I was really excited to see we had three girls join our class! Ash's startup material says that only 8% of the top start-ups are run by females, and 2 of them have founded their own businesses and are looking to further tweak them.
Natalie ran the communication styles exercise to identify what kind of leader everyone was today too. The students LOVED it - and so did the chaplain and entrepreneurship dean who joined in. It was awesome to see that despite completely different cultures, the traits of drivers/expressive/amiable/analytical are consistent.
Tomorrow is my day to teach and I'm really nervous but also very excited after seeing the students' enthusiasm today!
- Katie