Ghana’s Top 13 Under 30

And that’s a wrap!  Katie and I have just finished teaching our home-grown New Venture Creation pilot course at All Nations University to thirteen of Ghana’s best and brightest students!  I can confidently say that creating and teaching this course has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.  I’d do it again in a heartbeat!

Katie and I had no idea how the entrepreneurship bootcamp that we created would pan out in the classroom.  Would the students be bored?  Were we adding any value to their business educations?

Luckily, we worried for no reason… the course was an incredible success and we received incredibly positive feedback from the students (more to come on that… stay tuned)!

AND… a business opportunity has already come out of the course!  Michael, the winner of our final pitch competition (who received a $150 prize) is in talks with the Dean of the business school to launch his business.  After hearing his pitch, the Dean liked his idea so much that he has assembled a committee to help Michael assess if the idea is feasible, and if so, provide financing to get the business started.

It all starts with a raw idea

But let me start by giving some background on the course.  Nicole asked Katie and me to construct an entrepreneurship course curriculum that would serve as a pilot project for a course that Ivey alumni would teach at Ivey’s partner schools across Africa.  What we created is a one-week course that walks students through the process of creating a startup company so that they can confidently pitch their businesses in a final competition.  The course involves very little lecturing and is kind of a hybrid between an idea workshop and a focus group.  It’s like an idea workshop because students start with a raw business idea and are challenged to develop key elements of it over the course of the week.  A lot of the course's value also comes from its focus group aspect, as students are constantly presenting their ideas to the class for their classmates to poke holes in them. 

The BEST students a teacher could ask for 

I think the value-add of this course really sunk in when Katie and I did feedback surveys half-way through the course.  The students loved the hands-on aspect of it.  The students most commonly cited the “role plays, presentations, and team work” as the best parts of the course.  My favourite response was when a student said that an area where we could improve was having longer classes so that we can cover more! 

The students also found the concepts that we covered to be really valuable.  One thing in particular that we received a lot of positive feedback on was when we spent a day in the computer lab creating "cashflow forecasts" in Excel. But beyond the feedback, it was so rewarding to see the students scribbling down everything we said in class.  And I can’t tell you how much the students treasured the slide decks and other class materials that we used!  

I could honestly go on forever with talking about how much I adored teaching this course, even though I’m aware that I’m sounding pretty braggy!  But because this post is getting pretty long, I’ll just summarize a couple highlights.  My two favourite moments of the course were:

• A class movie night when we watched the student-chosen movie Queen of Katwe (sidebar: it was the best movie night turnout I’ve seen in all my years of school)

• Stretching our comfort zones and perfecting our presentation skills with a game called PowerPoint Karaoke on the last day

Okay, I can’t help myself… I just need to say a couple more things about how awesome the students were.  Before I went to Ghana, I taught a first-year introductory business course called Business 1220 during intersession at Western.  The Ghanaian/Nigerian students (half of our class was actually Nigerian) were very different from the Canadian students.  First of all, doing this course was completely voluntary for the All Nations students.  They took it because they just wanted to learn from us!  The All Nations students honestly just came to class ready to have a good time while learning.  They always laughed at our jokes (laughs are hard to come by amidst the cricket sounds of a 1220 classroom at Western), were always attentive during class, and they got 100% into all the activities that we did (they were much less shy than Canadian students)!

Learning is a two-way street

While the entire teaching experience was awesome, the absolute best part was getting to know the students.  I learned so much from them and their ambition and drive inspired me so much. 

I was also inspired by the students’ emphasis on community rather than the individual.  In general, I think Ghanaians value the community more than the individual, which is something Canadians could learn from.  This community-focus was made obvious by the students a couple of times throughout the course.  A good example of it was when the competition winner, Michael, bought the class lunch at a nice restaurant with his prize money!

I’m so grateful I had the opportunity to teach this class.  Now that it's over, I'm already going through withdrawal.  Thank you to all the students: you’re all inspirational and the future of Ghana/Nigeria looks bright with you at the helm!