GUEST ROOM | What Ghana Added to My MBA Experience

Cecily Cox is an MBA candidate at Cornell Johnson Graduate School of Management, where she serves as Student Council Co-President, a Sustainable Business Fellow and Student Advocacy Chair for the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly. 

I landed in Accra, Ghana during the day, separate from the rest of my group. At that moment, it was just me, moving through an airport I didn’t know, trying to understand where I was supposed to go next.

No clear path, no instructions, just the need to move, ask, adjust and keep going.

By the time I joined the group, there were 34 of us: mostly graduate students pursuing a Master of Business Administration connected to the Emerging Markets Fellowship, a program at Cornell’s S.C. Johnson Graduate School of Management focused on studying and working in developing economies, plus a few other MBA students, a Ph.D. candidate and a few students pursuing Executive MBAs. For all of us, it was our first time in Ghana.

The trip was originally supposed to be in Nigeria, a major economy in sub-Saharan Africa. However, plans changed after updated travel guidance raised safety concerns.

Instead, we went to Ghana, also in sub-Saharan Africa, smaller than Nigeria but a country that has also become an important hub for business and investment in West Africa. In recent years, it has attracted foreign investment and positioned itself as a gateway to the region. For a group trying to understand how businesses operate across emerging markets, it made sense. Ghana offered access and a clear view into how companies are growing and operating on the ground. 

We traveled with Dr. Lourdes Casanova, director of the Emerging Markets Institute, who leads these treks to different countries each year. We also had two class assistants with us, helping keep things moving, even though they had not been to Ghana before.

Back at Johnson, a lot of what we learn is how to operate when things aren’t fully structured: how to make decisions without having everything laid out. In Ghana, that showed up in real time. The trek moved fast, sometimes five business visits in a single day, so you were taking things in as they happened.

One of the stops was Global Mamas. It’s a business built around handmade production, but the product is sold to customers outside Ghana. That alone creates pressure for the business. Everything must come together at the right level, even though work happens across different people and places.

While we were there, we got to see the full process up close. The women walked us through how they dye the fabric, then use wax to create the designs. 

Watching them work, you could see the level of care in every step. There was a focus on getting it right, not rushing through it. You could feel how much pride they took in what they were making.

Sitting in class, you talk about how to handle that kind of complexity. Being there physically, you could see how much coordination sits behind the business. It made the way we talk about operations in class feel more concrete. 

Another stop during those days was Ekumfi Fruits and Juices, where we walked through the full operation, from growing pineapples to producing juice. The business has built access to international markets, including selling through Walmart’s online store, which lets them reach customers directly without going through traditional retail channels. That also means the standards are high and don’t change. The product has to be consistent.

Ekumfi Fruits controls a large part of their supply, managing thousands of acres of farmland so they can meet demand; they run processing at a scale of about 10 tons of fruit per hour. They also use nearly every part of the fruit, turning what would be waste into other products. 

At the same time, the value doesn’t leave with the product. More of it stays in Ghana through jobs and local processing.

The company’s process only works because everything connects. Farming, processing and distribution all have to hold together for the product to come out the same way each time.

Seeing that up close made it easier to understand what actually sits behind something as simple as a bottle of juice.

Between the business visits, we spent time in places that gave context to everything we were seeing. Cape Coast Castle is a coastal fortress built in the 17th century that later became a major site in the transatlantic slave trade, where enslaved Africans were held before being forced onto ships. Standing in the dungeon, there was no distance from it. People were held in that room, packed together, with no light, no air, surrounded by disease and waste, with no way out. You don’t have to imagine it. You’re standing in it.

Some of my ancestors are from West Africa. I don’t know the exact path, but there’s a real chance places like this exist somewhere in that history. Being there made that indistinct past feel a lot closer.

It also changed how I think about emerging markets. The systems we study were shaped over time by extraction, by people and resources being taken and by structures that were never built for the people living there. That history doesn’t disappear. It shows up in how economies are set up and what opportunities look like now.

Standing in that space makes it hard to separate the past from the present. If you’re trying to understand where a market is today, you have to account for what it has been through.

Frameworks and theories give you a way to think. Being in Ghana showed me what that looks like when everything is happening at once and nothing is paused for you.

Across the trip, in the businesses we visited and the places that shaped them, one thing kept coming up: you don’t wait for perfect conditions. You move, ask questions and figure things out as you go.

That’s the part you don’t fully get in a classroom. You have to be in it. And the Emerging Markets Institute at Cornell University made that possible.

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