Long before anyone in Accra used the word startup, the city ran on a set of trades that are still, by a wide margin, how most people here earn. They are not quaint. Some of them move more money than the companies that get written about.
This is what they are, how they work, and what an outsider consistently gets wrong about them.
Market trading
The market is the oldest and largest business institution in Accra, and the market women who run it are its most underestimated commercial force. Makola traders finance stock, extend credit, set prices and move volumes that would make a formal retailer envious — largely outside the banking system.
What outsiders get wrong: assuming it is unorganised. A market has associations, queen mothers of specific commodities, allocated spaces, credit lines and enforcement. Turning up with money and no relationship gets you a bad price.
Food, cooked and sold
Kenkey, waakye, banku, fufu, jollof, khebab, tea. The single most common business in Accra, at every scale from a coal pot on a stool to a chop bar seating forty.
The economics are brutal and clear: your margin is the difference between market prices this morning and what people will pay at noon. Volume and consistency are everything, and a seller with a following can charge more than the stall next door for the same plate.
— Start a kenkey or waakye business — Start a chop bar — What to eat in Accra
Barbering and hairdressing
Two of the most reliable trades in the city, because the demand does not go away and cannot be imported. A barber with a chair and a following has a business; a salon that can braid well has a waiting list.
— Start a barbershop — Start a hair salon — Hair and barbers in Accra
Tailoring and dressmaking
Ghana still has its clothes made rather than bought, for anything that matters. Funerals, weddings, church, Friday wear and school uniforms keep tailors and seamstresses working, and the trade is organised around seasons rather than location.
Spare parts and mechanics
Abossey Okai is one of West Africa’s great spare parts markets, and the mechanic trade clustered around it is a full industrial ecosystem — sourcing, fitting, machining, panel beating, rewiring. Nothing about it is informal in the sense of casual.
— Start a car wash — Importing a car
Second-hand everything
Kantamanto is the largest second-hand clothing market in West Africa and an entire manufacturing economy in its own right: bales come in, and are sorted, repaired, restyled, resold and remade. The same pattern runs through second-hand electronics, phones and furniture.
It is also the reason a new-clothing boutique in Accra has to explain its price.
— Start a boutique — Where to shop in Accra
Susu and informal finance
susu collection — a daily or weekly contribution held and returned as a lump sum — is how an enormous share of Accra’s small business capital is actually raised. It predates the banks and outperforms them on trust, at the cost of no deposit protection whatsoever.
Know which you are dealing with: a licensed savings-and-loans institution, or a man with a notebook. Both are called susu.
Trading, transport and carrying
Trotro operation, okada, delivery riders, and the kayayei who carry loads in the markets. These are businesses with real capital structures — a trotro is financed, a mate is employed, a route is allocated by a station union.
— Trotro guide — Ride-hailing and delivery apps
Craft and making
Kente and woven cloth, carpentry and furniture, metalwork and welding, goldsmithing, beadwork, coffin making — which in Ghana is a design trade with genuine artistry. Most run on apprenticeship and word of mouth rather than advertising.
— Learning a trade — Finding a tradesperson
Drinking spots and provisions
The corner shop and the drinking spot are the two most numerous premises in residential Accra. Both live on being the nearest one, which makes location almost the whole business.
— Start a provisions shop — Accra nightlife
The apprenticeship system
This is the part most outsiders miss entirely. Ghana’s trades train their own people, informally and at scale: a young person attaches to a master, works for years for little or nothing, and leaves with a skill and sometimes a set of tools. There is often a fee, sometimes a graduation ceremony, and almost never a contract.
It is the country’s largest vocational education system and it is invisible in the statistics. If you are starting a trade business, you will meet it from both sides.
Two things that are changing
Instagram and WhatsApp have become the shopfront. A boutique, a baker or a caterer now reaches customers with no premises at all, which weakens the old rule that location decides everything — for some trades, and not for a chop bar.
Mobile money has formalised the cash. A trade that used to leave no record now leaves one, which cuts both ways: it makes credit possible and it makes you visible to the GRA.
Where to trade, by the numbers
— Business viability checker — The map of Greater Accra — Entrepreneurship in Accra