One thing that I really appreciate about Google is their sporadic Google Doodles and how they encourage me to learn more about people I may have never heard of before. Earlier this week, they honored Ghanaian woman, Esther Afua Ocloo and I was thrilled to learn more about someone from this wonderful country and their contributions to the world.
I started by asking my co-worker, Jonathan, who she was. It took him a moment, but then he started telling me about a food company that she founded. This company cans palm nut soup, a very common dish in Ghana, and it’s exported around the world. Jonathan shared his memories of his time studying in Germany and buying this prepared palm nut soup and neat (boxed) fufu when he had cravings of home. He explained that it was important because Westerners don’t want to have to hear the rhythmic pounding of the pestle and mortar that is necessary to make the palm nut soup and fufu.
After hearing Jonathan’s story, I dug a little bit deeper into who Esther was and what her contributions were that Google thought to honor. Born in 1919 in a village in what is now the Volta Region, Esther was sent by her grandmother to primary school, but because of poverty did not board and instead traveled each week with food supplies to be able to cook for herself during the week, rather than spend money on the school’s food. She was awarded a scholarship to the prestigious Achimota School.
During her time at Achimota, she was the first person to start a formal food processing business in Ghana where she made marmalade and sold it to the school, and later to the military. She was able to secure a loan and start Nkulenu Industries (using her maiden name), which is still making and exporting jams today.
After independence, she worked with President Nkrumah to combat the prejudice and stigma of locally produced goods by arranging the first “Made in Ghana” exhibition. With that she became the president of the Federation of Ghana Industries and became the first woman to be Executive Chairman of the National Food and Nutrition Board of Ghana.
By the 1970s, she began to work to increase the economic opportunities afforded to women. In 1975, she went to the first UN World Conference on Women in Mexico and in 1979 she helped to found Women’s World Banking, a pioneer in microcredit and small business loans for women. In 1990, she became the first woman to win the Africa Prize for Leadership. She stood up for all entrepreneurial women saying:
“We found that a woman selling rice and stew on the side of the street is making more money than most women in office jobs – but they are not taken seriously.”
Throughout her life, she championed sustainability, agriculture and creative solutions to some of the problems that plagued Ghana and the world, such as hunger, poverty and wealth distribution.
“Our problem here in Ghana is that we have turned our back on agriculture. Over the past 40 years, since the beginning of compulsory education, we have been mimicking the west.”
She died in 2002 from pneumonia, but as former Ghanaian President John Kufuor said, “Her good works in the promotion of development in Ghana cannot be measured.”
