My name is Gideon John Amefu. I come from a family of six, my parents inclusive. I live at New Weija a suburb of the Accra Metropolis. I am a student and I am currently at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology pursuing a degree course in Civil Engineering.

I started a marketing business in order to lift some burden off my parents. I market products such as popcorn machines,hand-made crafted bead bags and purses, wooden bags and more via internet. The money I gain from the sale of these items are used to pay my school fees and my feeding. I also sometimes re-invest the money into other lucrative businesses to get my returns. As a young gentleman, I want to come out of the University prepared to affect my generation positively. I want to do this by training my fellow young ones the skills and appropriate way to marketing especially in Ghana and Africa- this will mean I should have a hands-on training in that regard. With the help of Zidisha and lenders I will promote my marketing plans.

I love to play table tennis, video games as well as football. At my free time I love to read my bible, search for more website where I can post my adverts and market more items online.

The business I do is online marketing of products. I mostly market products such as teaching aids to people online, door-to-door, through posters and advertisement. My Dad is a handicraft producer who mainly produces teaching aids in both wooden and digital forms. These teachings aids are a supplement to help teachers guide children in their formative stages. The teaching aids would help build their fundamental study of pronouncing words and how to communicate. There is a demand for these goods and services because there are a lot of schools encompassing my neighbourhood and these different schools need these teaching aids to help boost their level of communication to children. My business is much preferred because the teaching aids are sharp,real,easy to read and understand,quality,durable and very attractive and most of all very reasonable(in terms of cost). The business is profitable because there isn't much of a competiton and therefore we are able to supply to a large number of schools in the neighbourhood and make our profits. The main risks my business faces is that, should there be an error in the wording(digital form of teaching aids), it could be rejected and the cost of production is lost. However, this risk isn't so much of a problem because we have alternatives to remedy the situation whenever it occurs. I mostly make approximately 95usd every month. I believe through advertisement I can take over a greater number of schools in my country.

This loan is going to be invested into purchasing of items for the production of more locally made electric and gas popcorn machines. Over the years, I have been in the business of just buying and selling of popcorn machines. Gradually we have been able to build up our capital through Zidisha and we now want to become the main producers of the machines and sell them on the Ghanaian market. We have two different types of machines. We have the single popcorn machine and double popcorn machines. For each type of machine, they are either built to use gas or electricity. This provides a whole lot of options for the common Ghanaian to choose from. Each single machine costs 91 dollars whilst the double machine costs 182 dollars. We averagely sell 3-4 machines in a week which puts our sales revenues between 273-546 dollars each week. Our profits each week is approximately 145 dollars. I believe we can help the common Ghanaian start a popcorn business if they buy just one of our machines and this could help improve their standard of living.