Driving Research & Data Services for Agribusinesses in Ghana

One of the KIC Fellows, Hannah Dorkenu, reached out to me earlier in 2025, wanting to interview me for her research. It explores how research and data services can better support agribusinesses in Ghana. She is a final-year Master of Development Practice student at UC Berkeley, California. That area is close to my old stomping grounds of Stanford but it can feel as far as the farm gate. Hannah was trying to find out how research and data services can support agribusinesses in Ghana to make more strategic, evidence-based decisions. It would not stop there, the findings would form the design of a practical research support service.

For more than 4 years now, I have been the Entrepreneurship Development Specialist at the  Kosmos Innovation Center (KIC). KIC transforms, invests in and supports businesses in the agric value chain, especially young people. I have been managing our flagship program - AgriTech Challenge - inception in 2016 - since 2020, after spending a year in Portfolio Management. Thanks to an expansion program with the Mastercard Foundation circa 2021, we had over 452 teams participating in the cohort ending in 2025. This included at least 150 businesses being started in this latest cohort. AgriTechie teams typically consist of 3-4 people.

At KIC, we provide comprehensive training in entrepreneurship, all for free, covering:

• Business conceptualization and development

• Product development (building Minimum Viable Products - MVPs)

• Legal & organizational aspects

• Team formation & building

• Business development (marketing, sales, etc)

• The entire process from startup to traction to profitability.

Here’s to writing more #MightyAfrican articles like this 🙂

Hurdles in Business Decision-Making for Startups:

For the ecosystem and markets in which (agric-related) startups operate in Ghana, there are a few things that could be done easily but tend to be difficult especially when co-founders come together.

• Identifying the Business Idea: Deciding what business to pursue based on interests, experience, strengths, network, and skills.

• Pricing: Determining pricing based on a thorough analysis of all costs (production, marketing, distribution, salaries/wages) to establish unit cost and desired profit margin.

• Shareholding Structure: Deciding on equity distribution among founders and new members, considering sweat equity, time commitment, and financial contributions.

Information Gathering for Decision-Making:

• Startups primarily rely on self-conducted market research due to lack of funds to pay for external services. 

• For raw material costs (e.g., tomatoes): They directly contact farmers, aggregators, or market sellers to get price information.

• For market size determination: We train them on a "bottom-up approach," which involves identifying a prototypical target customer, estimating their number in a geographical area, and assessing how much they would spend to solve their problem annually.

• For operational costs (e.g., machinery, salaries): They research these costs themselves.

• For year-on-year decisions (e.g., sourcing cashews for expansion): They rely on their personal database of suppliers, considering proximity, logistics, price, and variety. This personal database is built through direct outreach to suppliers and information from government bodies like MOFA (Ministry of Food and Agriculture).

Gaps and Barriers in Data Usage:

• Current Market Research Effectiveness: The interviewee believes startups generally do a good job with market research, but there's a significant lack of readily available, accessible, and affordable business data.

• Data Deficits:

1. Difficulty finding data for market sizing.

2. Lack of readily available pricing data for raw materials and services.

3. Lack of information on cost analysis (e.g., machinery, operational expenses).

4. Difficulty finding data on salaries/wages for different roles.

• Biggest Barriers to Effective Data Use (ranked):

1. Cost of assessing the data: High transport and accommodation costs for physical market research, and fees for accessing certain online data.

2. Relevance of available data: Not explicitly ranked as high, but implied by the lack of readily available business data.

3. Skills to interpret the data: Less of a concern; entrepreneurs are generally able to interpret data for their needs.

4. Timing: Not a significant issue, as businesses can pivot or continue working.

5. Data Source Trustworthiness: Not explicitly discussed as a major barrier.

Analogy with Bay Area Organic Farming:

• Hannah shared an example of how easily accessible a comprehensive database of organic farmers (including location, crops, tonnage, contact info) is in the Bay Area, contrasting it with the difficulty in Ghana.

• This is facilitated by organic certification requirements (which involve fees) and supportive state organizations that buy from transitioning organic farmers and provide incentives. 

• I acknowledge that Ghana is working towards similar infrastructure.

There is a great opportunity for youth to provide research and data services for startups, businesses, organizations, etc. We encourage our KIC entrepreneurs to do market research, and we also fund for them to conduct market research, visiting and engaging several stakeholders around and across the agricultural value chains. We are also in the age of data analysts. In fact, I meet so many these days and I hope they all have jobs to do.

Maybe we need to see more revenue generated in our businesses and local funding, to create more jobs in this space. Actually, we do. We need to identify and ensure there are bigger addressable markets, and the revenue opportunity must be huge and clear. These kinds of jobs can follow the agents, extension officers and business development roles that are growing with the startups in Ghana. Many can make careers out of researching, and not just relegating this to volunteering to do so. We need to see more gainful employment, and there is a lot to gain from research.