Ghana Development Project
The school’s International Business Development (IBD) program was something I’d always wanted to be a part of, and I was fortunate enough to be selected for it. The program is an opportunity for MBA students to put their skills to the test by providing pro bono (ie. free) consulting services to clients around the developing world across a wide range of development issues – communications technologies, nutrition and hunger, health care, education tourism etc.
In January 2005 we were broken up into groups of four and assigned our clients, which covered many countries including Mexico (an orphanage and an eco-tourism community program), Bolivia (traditional organic products), Chile (eco-tourism on Easter Island), India (health care), Kenya and Ethiopia (agriculture) and Ghana (education).
Our team consisted of Josh Moreen (from Montana), Kirsten Tobey (San Francisco), Grethe Petersen (Denmark) and me. Our client was a Berkeley alum and philanthropist named Dick Beahrs, who was serving on the UN Hunger Task Force team (one of the Millenium Development Goals set up by Jeff Sachs et al). His interest was on a School Feeding Program in rural Ghana that utilized locally-produced foods (as opposed to imported food aid from the USA and other countries, which depresses the local agricultural economy and makes local communities heavily dependent on food aid, which is clearly unsustainable in the long run).
In short, he wanted us to go to Ghana, observe this pilot project and other school feeding programs, identify best practices and develop a plan for scaling up this project to a national level. We would head to Ghana for three weeks at the end of semester, from late May to mid-June.
