Kumasi, as part of Columbia’s Millennium Cities Initiative (MCI) is working on a number of projects in infrastructure, health and education that will hopefully bring the city closer to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Our project is a key component of that effort due to the obvious benefits that the increased economic activity can bring to the city.
The first lesson we learned might seem obvious, but is very important: You can’t market a product you don’t know. The many hours we spent reading reports on Kumasi and browsing what was available online didn’t give us much of an idea of what we discovered in the end.
What we discovered was a city with a rich history as the capital of the Ashanti Kingdom and the home of many local crafts such as Kente cloths and Adinkra prints. We also learned about areas with untapped tourism potential such as Lake Bosomtwe and the Bomfobiri Wildlife Sanctuary. On the business side, despite all the challenges, we found a local administration working to improve the infrastructure and we discovered some intrinsic advantages of Kumasi over other cities in Ghana.
Even though it is the second largest city in Ghana and has more than a million inhabitants, Kumasi has serious infrastructure challenges surrounding its road network, electricity, water and Internet (getting our emails in Kumasi took a painfully long time). Many businesses complain that the centralization of government services in the capital, Accra, is a heavy burden to their productivity.
The team has been working hard on the project and we are in the process of developing an actionable set of recommendations for the city that we think can make a difference. The rest of the team — Kenny Hsu, Dario Cacciatore and Andre Le — will travel to Kumasi again in May to formally present our proposal and to start working with the project stakeholders to help Kumasi achieve the MDGs.
This consulting project was supported by the Social Enterprise Program’s International Development Consulting Project Fund, for the Earth Institute at Columbia University.
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