Ghana was selected as the venue for the
headquarters to launch the implementation phase of the AfCFTA during a Summit of AU Heads of states in Niamey in July last year. The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) is the largest free trade area in the world. AfCFTA has the potential to transform the continent with its potential market of 1.2 billion people and combined GDP of around $3 trillion across the 54-member states of the AU.
The COVID-19 pandemic has heightened the importance of the success of the AfCFTA. The destruction of global supply chains has reinforced the necessity for closer integration amongst African states to boost our mutual self-sufficiency, strengthen local economies and reduce our dependence on external sources.
In spite of the huge potentials AfCFTA opens up to the business community in Ghana, language barrier could hinder the full participation in inter-border trade. Ghana shares a border with French-speaking Togo, Burkina Faso and Ivory Coast. However, a majority of Ghanaians
cannot speak or read French as a second language to freely trade with our neighbours. French is generally regarded as a difficult language to learn though thought at the pre-secondary school levels in Ghana.
To mitigate the language barrier challenge especially among trade,
Lademy, a start-up in the Node Hub/Ghana Tech Lab Incubation program has launched a digital platform that seeks to make the learning of “trade-French” easy for all.
Lademy is co-founded by Miss Esther Awine and Mr Hermon Sel Hammah Tettey, who recently graduated from a web development-training program designed by the Ghana Tech Lab under the Pathway to Sustainable Employment (PaSE) project. The project is a MasterCard Foundation- Young Africa Works, Ministry of Communication, and the World Bank-funded project implemented across the country to train unemployed graduates in web development skills for free. The focus was to give these youths digital and employable skills to become full-stack developers in just six weeks.
Lademy emerged the
winners at the
Ho Startup Pitch Summit in 2020, which booked them a place in the Node Hub’s incubator program. They have undergone a series of technical and business training to build their Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and take their start-up to market.
As teachers, Esther and Herman developed lademy to be student-friendly to empower their customers to learn French in an easy and fun way. Lademy provides users with the opportunity to learn new vocabularies to aid their oral communication at their own pace without a need for a personal French tutor. They believe the need to engage and transact business in the second-largest language across Africa has become a necessity as Ghana hosts the AfCFTA, a key driver for market growth.
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