Hiring Ghana’s first ball stitchers

A common piece of advice given by experienced entrepreneurs is that mistakes are inevitable, particularly during the early stages of setting up a business. If businesses are going to fail they tend to do so in the first two years of operations. If all new businesses make mistakes, then the key to our success is how quickly we learn from them, and I’d like to think we have a bit of a head start at A&K Ghana. We have a wealth of experience to draw on having already set up successful stitching centres in Kenya and Zambia and one less successful venture in South Africa.

In Ghana, we have incorporated our experiences from elsewhere and have devised a recruitment process that brings us talented young stitchers who really want to work and can meet our production expectations quickly. I have personally learnt from a couple of challenges I faced with recruitment in Zambia. I thought I’d highlight two particular issues and how we plan to deal with them:

Nepotism needs to be avoided

Our first group of stitchers in Zambia were hired largely through extended family ties. This may sound immediately silly, but when recruiting people who don’t read papers or check internet job pages, it can be an efficient system. We ended up with a production team who were cousins, brothers and sisters etc with people already associated with the enterprise’s board and management team. This brought the following challenges:

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