Over thirty residents of Abeadze Kwekrom in the Mfantseman Municipality of the Central Region have suffered fish poisoning after eating fresh fish which was sold to them by a stranger in the community.
Information gathered revealed that the stranger after selling the poisoned fresh fish left the area and has not been seen ever since.
Speaking in an interview with Yaw Boagyan, the victims said they suffered severe stomach upset after taking in the fresh fish and had to take in drips at the Ekwamase Health Centre to make them stable.
The incident has thrown the residents into a state of fear and panic as they have stopped strangers from selling in the Community.
Meanwhile, the affected people are now in stable condition.
COCOA paste maintained its lead as the highest earner among the top 10 products that contributed most to the country’s Non-Traditional Export (NTE) earnings last year.
Management of the Ghana Exim Bank has been lauded by key stakeholders within the Trade and Finance sector as well as players in the Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) and Creative Arts industry for its effort in the promotion of Made-In-Ghana products and services.
When Vendease launched in January 2020, it wanted to solve the challenges and inefficiencies in Nigeria’s highly fragmented food sector using a marketplace model that connected suppliers and farms to restaurants and food businesses, with deliveries facilitated within 24 hours.
But over the next couple of months, Vendease switched from its middleman role — after noticing that some of these businesses complained of delivery times, quality of food supplies, and inadequate set-up to handle operations — to one where building on its relationship with food suppliers, buys discounted products in bulk, stores them and makes deliveries through third-party logistics partners.
The YC-backed food procurement platform has doubled down on the pivot — instrumental to the company’s $3.2 million seed round last October — to raise $30 million in Series A funding (split between $20 million equity and $10 million debt).
CEO Tunde Kara, in an interview with TechCrunch, said Vendease plans to use the investment to deepen operations, consolidate its presence in eight cities across Nigeria and Ghana (the company recently expanded to the latter), move into new markets, and build new products to increase customers’ efficiency.
“We’re building technology to efficiently move food from the point of production to the point of consumption,” Kara said on the call about his company’s drive. “Everything we build at Vendease — financing, logistics, warehousing, inventory management — is tailored towards ensuring that food flows efficiently from that point of production to the point of consumption.”
Vendease allows African restaurants and food business to buy supplies, access financial services, and power their business operations. There’s a reason why Vendease is thorough about improving efficiency in this supply chain. According to the company, most customers, including restaurants and food businesses, hospitals, hotels and schools, are subject to $100 billion in annual losses due to several factors. They range from unreliable supply and wastage to limited data on making informed procurement decisions to little or no capital to fund procurement. Its platform, described as a series of stacks, is designed to mitigate losses and help food businesses thrive.
The platform claims to have moved approximately 400,000 metric tonnes of food for its more than 2,000 customers and assisted them in saving about $2 million in procurement costs and over 10,000 in person-hours over the last 12 months. Kara, who founded the company with Olumide Fayankin, Gatumi Aliyu, and Wale Oyepeju, also mentioned that Vendease has saved its customers almost $500,000 in wastage costs due to overstocking. The chief executive attributed this progress to fully utilizing businesses’ data and providing them with the necessary resources — particularly around inventory management — at every step of their journey, including delivery routes: Vendease has slashed its delivery time from 24 to 12 hours.
“Since businesses don’t have access to accurate data, they usually buy what they don’t need. We help them to solve that problem in two ways,” Kara commented on the company’s progress. “One, because businesses know they can get anything on our platform in 12 hours, they don’t need to stock some of the things they would’ve stored before. Two, they can also track what they bought and know how much is left before they need to buy again.”
While Vendease applies data to how it disburses working capital via its BNPL offering, there’s been a change of strategy from what it operated last year: Instead of using its books, the company now partners with banks and financial institutions to provide financing through its platform. So far, businesses have accessed more than $12 million worth of inventory via the embedded finance product. Its revenue, which the company says has grown 5x over the past year, comes from deals it makes with suppliers; it’s yet to monetize its lending business.
Ultimately, Vendease, while building the operating system that automates the flow of food from farm to restaurant, envisions itself as a plug-and-play solution for yet-to-be-launched African restaurants and food businesses in the next three to five years. The participation of lead investors in this round, TLcom Capital and Partech Africa (both control large pan-African funds), bodes well for that plan, said the chief executive, adding that having both investors on board means his company has backers “ready to go the long haul.”
Andreata Muforo, a partner at TLcom Capital, and Cyril Collon, general partner at Partech Africa, say they’re backing Vendease because they believe it can unlock significant value in Africa’s fragmented food supply chain and deliver robust solutions that impact critical issues around the food system on the continent, per the statement shared by Vendease. Other investors in the round include existing investors VentureSouq, Hustle fund, Hack VC, GFR Fund, Kube VC, Magic Fund, and Kairos Angels (the company raised debt from the local finance market, per a statement).
For a non-fintech business, Vendease’s equity round closed somewhat quickly despite conversations around a cooling venture capital market, parties involved told TechCrunch. Investors’ interest in the business and the emergence of other players, such as OneOrder and TopUp Mama, indicate massive room for growth in this market segment where restaurants’ and food businesses’ needs are a priority. This holds more true in light of rising inflation and global food supply shortages, where the cost of food is 42% higher than it was between 2014 and 2016, per data from this food price index.
“Something important to us about our current growth and impact is despite the ongoing global food supply shortage and inflation, Vendease is helping our users save big and provide relative stability for their stock levels. Shielding them (to a large extent) from the most severe effects of the current global shortage,” commented Kara. “What excites us is we can have even more impact as we extend and entrench our technology within Africa and the rest of the world. And that’s what keeps us going.”
Ghana-based agribusiness company Maphlix Trust exports vegetables to markets such as the UK and Dubai and also supplies local companies like KFC and Shoprite. Jeanette Clark talks to founder and managing director, Felix Kamassah, about how he secured international clients, local import substitution opportunities, and why he sees potential in the processing of sweet potatoes.
The Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) on Thursday arrested some management members of three businesses in Accra for failure to issue Value Added Tax (VAT) invoices.
The General Agricultural Workers Union is warning of abject poverty in farming communities up north.
According to the General Secretary, Edward Kareweh, his outfit’s investigations in some rural areas up north indicates that the unavailability of fertilisers and other farm inputs like seeds and equipment are likely to hamper the expected produce to be harvested.
To this development, Edward Kareweh, warns if the situation is not addressed immediately it could spell doom for the country’s food security.
His comment follows assertions by the Minister of Food and Agriculture, Dr. Owusu Afriyie Akoto that a ¢2.6 billion investment made by the government into the ‘Planting for Food and Jobs’ Programme has yielded expected results.
Speaking to Joy Business, Edward Kareweh, pointed out that the statement by the Minister is not the reality on the grounds as there seems to be a looming danger ahead.
“I am on the field, I am taking a tour of the three Northern Regions because as I consider them so. I have gone to the rural areas and am telling you that there is going to be abject poverty in 2023 because there is a lack of inputs”.
“You know, no fertiliser the inputs he’s talking about that is seed and fertiliser. I have gone to the villages and I am now in the Upper East Region, I have finished with the Northern Region not only in the cities but in the rural areas”, he added.
He expressed worry “we are not also relying on figures only. Look, you go on the grounds and see people’s lives are at stake. You know it has to do with lives, if you have 50,000 of your people who are starving of poverty of food, you must be concerned about that and that is the reality on the ground”.
A worker walks at the Yara ammonia plant in Porsgrunn, Norway August 9, 2017. Picture taken August 9, 2017. REUTERS/Lefteris Karagiannopoulos
Norway’s Yara (YAR.OL), one of the world’s largest fertiliser makers, said on Tuesday it will halt output at its Belgian unit “in the next few days”, as part of a wider European reduction plan linked to soaring gas prices.
• GDP expanded 4.8% in the second quarter; the median estimate was 2.7% • Ghana targets annual economic growth of 3.7% this year
Ghana’s economy grew faster than expected in the three months through June, expanding 4.8%, buoyed by manufacturing and cocoa production.
The median of five economists’ estimates in a Bloomberg survey was for a growth of 2.7%. Yields on Ghana’s dollar bonds were little changed after the release of the data, with the government’s budget targets seen as increasingly attainable. The economy grew 1.1% from the previous quarter.
Manufacturing was one of the main drivers of growth, along with cocoa production, Government Statistician Samuel Kobina Annim told reporters in the capital, Accra, on Tuesday. Ghana is the world’s second-biggest producer of chocolate-making ingredients after the Ivory Coast.
The industry sector accelerated to 4.4% from a year earlier, compared with a 0.5% contraction in the previous quarter, expansion in the agriculture sector slowed to 4.6% from revised growth of 5.1%, and services gained 5.2% from 5.6%.
The yield on Ghana’s dollar bonds maturing in 2032 widened by 5 basis points to 24.8% at 11.15 a.m. in Accra.
The pick-up in growth momentum will likely improve West Africa’s second-largest economy’s chances of reaching its expenditure and revenue targets. The finance ministry in July cut its growth forecast for 2022 to 3.7% from 5.8%. The median estimate of seven economists polled by Bloomberg last month is for an expansion of 3.9%.
Economic growth may be lackluster in the second half of the year due to weak private consumption, Mark Bohlund, a senior credit research analyst at REDD Intelligence said ahead of the release. Business conditions deteriorated for the seventh month and are at their worst level since the height of the pandemic as price pressures continued to weigh on demand, the S&P Global Ghana Purchasing Managers’ Index shows.
Inflation is at its highest level in 21 years, fanned by a 39% decline in the value of the cedi against the dollar. This prompted the central bank to raise the benchmark interest rate by 850 basis points in November, the steepest margin since the central bank was granted the independence to set borrowing costs in 2002, dampening consumer spending and deepening poverty.
Adverse economic conditions led the government to approach the International Monetary Fund in July for a $3 billion economic-support program. The lender is due to make a follow-up visit to Africa’s second-largest gold producer in the coming weeks.
