20 January 2025 – Conciliation meeting and settlement
We are always happy about the delicious mangoes that we can eat in Ghana. This morning we met a particularly nice mango seller with whom we had an informative conversation about her business. Unfortunately, she couldn’t speak English very well, so Jessica, a waitress, helped us with the translation.
The mango seller was balancing 20 mangoes, which she sells for 10 or 15 cedis (70 cents – just under one euro each) depending on the size. She can buy the mangoes for an average of 8-12.5 cedis each at the market. As she does everything on foot, there are no additional transportation costs for her. She can sell a maximum of 20 mangoes a day for an average profit of 2.5 cedis. Her optimum earnings would be 50 cedis per day in purely mathematical terms, which at the current exchange rate (January 2025) corresponds to around 2 euros and 75 cents.
She works an average of 12-14 hours for this. She alone bears the risk of not being able to sell all the mangoes. It is not possible for her to resell the mangoes, as is not the case throughout Ghana. There is obviously only one small production facility that produces fruit juice. Unfortunately, there is no other use for the fruit, such as jam or preserves.
Our most important appointment that day, however, was a meeting with lawyers in the government district of Accra. As you may know, we are having great difficulty unloading some of our donated hospital beds from the customs port. For almost 2 years we have been fighting with all our might to finally be allowed to distribute the remaining hospital beds to the recipients in the Bonoregion.
Together with the Catholic University of Ghana in Fiabre/Sunyani and our partner and friend Mensah Rex, various steps have been taken to uncover corrupt structures and get the containers to their destination. They have not given up to this day and are still fighting for the donated hospital beds.
Today’s meeting of the parties involved was something like the last attempt to prevent court proceedings by means of a settlement. It was exciting for us to have the opportunity to talk to both the defendant’s lawyers and “our” lawyer before the mediation meeting.
We were able to convey our point of view to them and, above all, describe our horror that something like this is possible in Ghana and how much we fear that the behavior of individual criminals will lead to no one wanting to donate to projects in Ghana. The meeting was scheduled for less than 30 minutes. After an hour, there was still no end in sight. As we were not allowed to attend the actual meeting, the wait was almost unbearable for us.
When the parties kept talking separately, we feared the worst. So we continued to wait. After almost 2 ½ hours, the time had finally come and the parties said goodbye to us, not without pointing out that the matter would most likely only be resolved in a matter of days.
If that was indeed the case, then our wait in the shade at over 30 degrees would have been well worth it. Keep your fingers crossed for us and our partners that the containers can finally be unloaded and transported onwards. If we are lucky, this will happen while we are still in Ghana. Either way, we will keep you informed here.