From our original set of projects, we had intended to start development of a fish farm out by the Volta region in eastern Ghana. For this venture, we found a wonderful partner in Evans Tasiame, whose intentions directly mirrored ours of providing assistance to struggling areas at little or no cost.

Evans is a local Ghanaian white collar professional who was raised in a rural village that specialized in fishing. Despite his rural roots, Evans also came from an educated and very supportive family that helped foster his development. With hard work fishing at night to feed his family, he also went to school during the day to better his chances in leading a successful life. And now, though he had moved to the city of Accra with a degree in electrical engineering and prospered in a variety of fields, he never forgot his roots or rural community.

Nor did he forget that small efforts of involved individuals can make huge changes in people’s lives. When we first met Evans one bright and early morning, he had just come from teaching a computer class for poor students in Accra. Not only was he doing this outside of his regular work schedule, he charged no money for his efforts.

He was teaching the class with one goal in mind: to help his fellow man.

Realizing that the blessings he had earned in life gave him the ability to help his home community, he partnered with Rural Upgrade Support Organization (RUSO), a local NGO based in Accra, Ghana. RUSO, like GO!, is an all volunteer based organization that seeks to better humanity in novel ways. RUSO’s main focus is ecological projects, one of those which happened to be developing a fish farm in Evans’s home town of Atito which GO! chose to sponsor.To start this venture, we visited the area where Evans had proposed to start the development of the farm in his home village. Evans was kind enough to invite us to his father’s home, which stands on beautiful floods plains of the Volta region. Bathed in the fire of the Ghana sun, this tiny and sleepy fishermen’s village possessed the great ability to slow the progress of time.

No one rushes here.

A simple walk to the village store was always delightfully slowed with obligatory asking of saying hello to one’s neighbor and letting you know that you were welcome to their village or home. Everyone listened to one another and when you expressed an opinion, you were given time to fully finish your thought. Coming from the rushed financial world in the West, where every other sentence is cut with “yeah, but…” or “do you have a point or should we just meet for lunch next quarter?”, this was refreshing as it was inspiring.Waking bright and early at the schedule of the local fisherman (4am for those obsessed with details), we spent a morning clearing and marking the land armed only with a few volunteers, fewer machetes , and no real proper tools besides human ingenuity.

Once our estimates were complete, we visited with an owner of a large fish farm outside of Accra to gather expert advice. The owner had been in the fish farm industry for 30 years and was a noted speaker on sustainable fish farm development in Africa, Europe, and the USA. We interviewed him for about 4 hours, asking him questions about fish farm size, fish to area ratios, waste disposal, watering filtering techniques in third world environments, and the like.

A most helpful individual, he then invited us to stay for lunch, which is fried tilapia served whole with fermented rice cake. And by “whole” tilapia, I mean you have to eat everything. Bone, jaw, head, tail, and the little body of meat all goes down the gullet.

This brings up a quick point about our devotion to this cause:

Forget the 4am wake up calls to blaring Ghanaian Rastafarian music.

Forget the blisters from clearing a 120 square meter fish farm area with only a few machetes.

Forget the sunburn from working in the broiling sun all day.

Try eating your 5th fish head in a row and then washing it down with fermented rice cakes.

That’s devotion.

If there was ever a Congressional Medal of Digestion, I think Kyle, Charlie, and I should be contenders.

With the land now set and the information all attained, Kyle and I set out in front of Excel for a better part of a day running all the numbers in various spread-sheets.

And this is where the troubles began.

Fish farming, in short, is a very low margin industry. The price of fish on the ground is quite low and the costs of feeding them are quite high. With our initial estimates failing to find profit, we began to re-run the numbers given an all male population (leading to larger fish for higher sell amounts), re-adjusting feed supplies (mixing locally grown cassava instead of hormone induced bio feeds), and adjusting the size of the pond.

No matter how we looked at the numbers, however, our current estimates given the local challenges of food delivery of the harvest, price of fish on the ground, and cost of feed, we simply could not make the numbers work. Though a profit could be attained, its returns were very low and the risks were quite high.

As such, no GO! money will be currently used in development of the fish farm.

In short, GO! itself is a new organization with limited funding. The current proposal would, in our opinion, lead to a project that may not be financially viable and hence not be in the best use of our funds. With limited funding and a huge supply of worthy causes, the funds we had ear-marked for RUSO will be diverted to Saboba’s Medical Centre to help refurbish their children’s ward.

That being said, Kyle and I are still actively assisting RUSO by supplying business advice and finding alternate sources of funding. Since both of us come from financial backgrounds (and the fact that I eat project plans for breakfast at Slalom Consulting back in the real world), we possess the ability to help RUSO succeed in forming a more coherent plan to build a larger and more viable farm. This will require assisting Evans and RUSO in finding funds from grants that will help subsidize the farm through its first years of development.

At this point, from our donor’s perspective, the usage
of our limited coffers to fund only a portion of the costs of what may not be a viable operation is simply not advisable. As for the future, however, I have come to learn that with solid work, prudent investment, and a positive outlook can make anything succeed.

So we will keep you posted.

Down but not out.