Finding Satisfaction in Self-Employment

NASEY Organic Oyster Mushrooms

The Self-Help International (SHI) Young Adult Training Centre (YATC) was established in 2013 to reduce unemployment in Ghana,especially among the youth, and related social vices such as robbery, prostitution, and unwanted teenage pregnancies. Thankfully, young adults including Bernard of Kumawu, Samuel of Offinso, and Veronica of Obuasi, to mention but a few, have gained employment and even become employers having passed through the Training Centre.

For Yaw, his encounter with the Centre brings him more than employment. He has joy and satisfaction.

Yaw is married to Eva and they have a three-year old daughter, Nana. In 2008, he completed Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology with a degree in Industrial Arts. From 2009 to 2011, he worked as a sales manager in a furniture manufacturing company. He later joined a brewery company and finally an insurance company, all as a sales person. He tells SHI he never found satisfaction in any of those places due to workplace politics. ‘I almost lost my life’ he lamented.

Nana helps her father with mushroom sales

In January 2015, Yaw enrolled at the SHI YATC and successfully graduated in mushroom production in February 2015. He has since been producing and marketing mushrooms. His business is named NASEY. This is a combination of the abbreviation of his name, his daughter and his wife. They produce pure organic mushrooms to the delight of many vegetarians in his community. His experience as a sales person has enabled him to quickly establish contacts with restaurants and supermarkets. Demand for NASEY mushroom is fast growing and he plans to mobilize past graduates from the training centre into an association to be able to control mushroom production and marketing and also meet demand from clients.

Though he acknowledges there are challenges, Yaw tells Self-Help there is joy in self-employment. It is indeed refreshing to see Nana lend a hand to her father.

It is gratifying, realizing that the training centre is providing opportunities for the unskilled and marginalized in society as well as for people like Yaw and their families who seek jobs they can do with passion so they can experience returns beyond the bottom line: inner joy and satisfaction.

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