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Yussif Yucubu, TradeAgent, Ghana

Greater Accra, Ghana

In the Upper Eastern Ghanaian town of Bawku, along the border with Burkina Faso, it is not uncommon to see young boys taking their family’s cattle into the bush. Armed with just a stick, a few young boys manage to keep dozens of cattle together and moving in the same direction, despite their proportional disadvantage. Yussif Yucubu was one of those boys, and for as long as he can remember, he’s been taking cattle into the bush on the weekends, after school, and during school vacations. As a young man, Yussif made the decision to leave his hometown and move to Accra to attend computer school, and a few years later, when TradeNet Ghana was interviewing for the position of a TradeAgent in Ashaiman Cattle Market, he was the first to sign up. This TradeAgent would need to know about livestock, understand the ins and outs of the market, and be able to use a computer and a mobile phone with ease. A 28 year-old energetic and bright Yussif was an easy choice. He now works as a TradeAgent, registering traders in the market, uploading offers to buy and sell cattle, sheep and goats, and connecting sellers in his market with traders he finds online. He also takes trips outside of the city to smaller villages so he can register those rural traders and transporters on TradeNet as well. Yussif speaks 6 languages, all of which he uses for his work. He says that when he left his small town for Accra his family thought he might abandon the family trade, and although they were concerned about the legacy, they pushed him to move forward and learn new things anyway. But now, as a TradeAgent in Ashaiman Cattle Market, it looks as if he’s found a way to seamlessly combine his new life with his old one.

Garcia Honvoh, Quality Assurance Specialist, Ghana

Greater Accra, Ghana

There are very few people in the world who can say 'we're updating the site today, and then we get to test!' with genuine, palpable enthusiasm. BusyLab is lucky enough to have discovered one of them. Garcia Honvoh, known in the office as Mama G, has been at BusyLab for two years working as a Quality Assurance Specialist. She says she is 'too curious', a characteristic she sees as a necessity to thrive in the world of QA. That curiosity, along with her determination to get to the bottom of any problem she’s investigating, has been part of her personality since she was a young girl growing up in Benin. Now, though, she gets to use it in a way she feels can positively impact people, and to her it’s the perfect job. Garcia loves finding defects in TradeNet before the public sees them, because at the end of the day, she says, QA exists to help developers create the best product they can, ensuring that users have a positive, hassle-free experience. It’s impossible to convey Garcia’s fabulous energy through the written word, but it can be said that she is not only consistent in keeping BusyLab’s software bug free, but also in cheering up the office on a daily basis. Garcia and her husband, a radio frequency engineer who also hails from Benin, are expecting their first child in October. They plan to teach the new baby all about technology, doing their part to usher in a new, tech savvy generation in West Africa.

Agnes Agyapong, Retailer, Ghana

Greater Accra, Ghana

"The market is not going like it used to" Agnes Agyapong explains, "it seems there is no money, and prices rise anyway". Agnes, a fruit and vegetable retailer in Accra's Mallam Atta market, has been working in the same corner, selling the same commodities, for 20 years. Her stall has an abundance of beautiful fresh cabbage, carrots, eggplants, shallots, pineapples, and mangoes, and positioned immediately next to her, behind a mountain of eggs, is her younger sister. They stress that though they have seen a lot of ups and downs in the market since they began, this seems different. At the end of the day, Agnes says that she usually has to sell her goods at a lower price just to have money for that night, and that this is, of course, the nightmare scenario for a retailer. Agnes just shrugs when asked how she can calculate a profit when times are as hard as they are now. In amazingly good spirits despite her troubles, Agnes says that for the last 20 years she has used her contacts in larger Accra markets, visiting once a week to buy at wholesale, bringing the goods back to her neighborhood market, and selling at retail prices. She works from 6 am-6 pm everyday at her stall, while her two children are in school. There is no market association in Mallam Atta, and Agnes wonders what an association could do for her anyway; she feels that her personal connections are what help her most in business. As a retailer, she spends very little on her phone for business, rather spending money on transport to the larger markets to buy what she needs and meet her contacts face to face to negotiate a decent price. For now, Agnes says, she, her sister, and her friends in the market are just waiting for things to look up.

Malik Abubakar-Abdul, Trader, Ghana

Greater Accra, Ghana

Ever wondered the difference between a cowpea from Northeastern Ghana and one from Southern Niger? Or Northern Togo? If so, Malik Abubakar-Abdul is your man. He'll happily show you the many varieties of cowpeas and maize in his shop, even attempting to make clear the minutia that differentiates one variety from the other. A 39-year-old trader in Accra, Malik has been trading for over 20 years, learning about and taking over the business from his father and uncle. He’s been a user of TradeNet for a year now, and has been contacted several times from buyers both inside and outside West Africa. He sees great hope in the opportunities TradeNet can bring, and says he is blessed to be a part of it. But his frustration with work and with the capability of these new technologies to really help his business is the same frustration that so many in the world of agriculture share: middlemen. And because so many middlemen have procured bank accounts in the last few years, it makes it that much easier to do business with them instead of with the farmers themselves. A large trader like Malik can now establish a relationship with a middleman, call when he needs goods, place the money straight into a bank account, and that same day have the goods on the way to Accra. A deal is done, and Malik has not even left his market. What would help, he says, is if the farmers were more organized, and as a group could get a bank account for themselves. He knows he could get a better price directly from them, and that they could have higher profits without the middlemen, but Malik says it’s a difficult cycle for one man alone to break. He works with seven sellers, all of whom have mobile phones, and he spends about 10 USD a week on phone credit, which he feels is quite low. He has two children who are going to school in Accra as well as learning Arabic from Malik himself, who is fluent.

Xose Ahlijah, Developer, Ghana

Greater Accra, Ghana

When he was 10 years old, Xose Ahlijah watched his father bring a PC into their Accra household for the first time. While Xose’s father planned to use the simple machine to write documents for work, his young son had other ideas. And it seemed that the more rules and regulations his Dad created to keep Xose away from it, the more trouble Xose was willing to get into just to get his hands on it. His Dad eventually acquiesced, and began teaching him all that he knew. Fourteen years later, at the age of 24, Xose is a web developer working on TradeNet. Between attending IT school and teaching himself, Xose is now fluent in Basic, Java, C++, PHP and ColdFusion. Because TradeNet is so innovative, and the team in Accra so close, Xose feels truly lucky to be where he is. He dreams of a day when he can walk out his door on the way to work and hear people talking about TradeNet--referring to the market prices, forex rates, weather alerts, or offers to buy and sell they received via SMS. He wants to feel, in the streets of Accra, the same way that Google employees must feel in the streets of the Bay area, overhearing the public talk about their product as a part of their everyday lives. Asked about frustrations, Xose gets a perplexed look and follows it right up with a big grin—for a good developer, he explains, coding frustrations are equivalent to stimulating challenges, and nothing could be better than a great challenge. And as an aside, Xose’s not just a star developer--he just planted 5 acres of cassava outside of Accra, and is waiting for the chance to upload an Offer to Sell onto the system he helped create.

Issa Keita, Trader, Mali

Bamako, Mali

In the hustle and bustle of Bamako’s frenzied markets, there is one man, donned with a suit and a smile, who has tapped into something he finds extraordinary. Since 2006, Issa Keita has been posting offers to sell on TradeNet, and transforming the very nature of the export business that he’s been in for 15 years. With contacts he made as a result of his posts, Issa has exported maize to Niger, cashews and peanuts to Senegal, shea nuts to Denmark, cowpeas to Burkina Faso and Togo…and that’s just the beginning of the list. These deals are quite large as well; rarely less than 100 tons and many times twice that much. Clearly that makes for a great deal money, which Issa estimates at over one million US dollars to date. Before he used TradeNet, Issa received a lot of local inquiries about his commodities but few people were able to come up with the capital to follow through with a deal. Now, able buyers all over West Africa and Europe are seeing his offers, either via SMS or the web, and as a result his business is booming. What’s best about TradeNet, Issa says, is that so much useful commercial information is within reach to anyone who wants to utilize it. His only frustration is that many people in the industry don’t jump on the opportunity to change the way they do business, because Issa sees taking advantage of such opportunities as essential to being a good businessman. He estimates that he spends around $600 a month on his phone for work, and also uses the internet every day. As more people come online, Issa expects to spend more time doing business online and less on his phone, hopefully saving money for his company. Issa was born and raised in Bamako, and cannot imagine living and working anywhere else. He has four children.