Ghana’s Richest Woman Is Building A Cocoa Empire In A Market Largely Dominated By Global Giants

Patricia Poku-Diaby didn’t build her fortune by simply exporting Ghana’s most valuable agricultural commodity.

She went after the part of the cocoa business where much more of the value is created: processing.

Poku-Diaby founded Plot Enterprise Ghana in 2010 and entered an industry where multinational companies had already built deep supply chains, manufacturing capacity and global customer networks.

Her strategy was different, instead of exporting the raw cocoa bean she decided to process Ghanaian cocoa in Ghana, create higher-value products and capture more of the economics before the beans leave the country.

But building a cocoa-processing business requires more than a factory.

It requires enormous working capital because processors have to buy large volumes of cocoa during the season, hold inventory and finance production before selling their finished products.

That is where Afreximbank entered the story.

Through its Africa Cocoa Initiative, the bank provided Plot Enterprise with working-capital financing in 2016. According to Afreximbank, Plot’s plant capacity utilisation subsequently increased by 90% within a year.

The bigger opportunity is much larger than one company.

Ghana is one of the world’s major cocoa producers, yet much of the industry’s highest-value processing and branded products have historically been captured further down the global value chain.

Poku-Diaby is betting that African businesses can capture more of that value themselves.

And cocoa is only one example of a much bigger economic question:

What happens when Africa stops exporting its raw materials and starts building the factories, brands and companies that capture the value created from them?

For Poku-Diaby, the answer is being built in Ghana one cocoa bean at a time.