How the Ghana Post Office is Failing the Entrepreneur

Nana Adwoa, a wig seller at Santasi-Kumasi receives an order for a ₵400.00 lace front wig from a client at Madina in the Greater Accra region through her Instagram page. She packages the product and sends it to the bus station incurring a transport cost of ₵20. Nana Adwoa will now pay an additional ₵50 to the bus for the package to be delivered to the Accra Terminal at Circle where a trusted delivery rider will pick it up and deliver to the customer at Madina for ₵60 at the expense of the customer (totalling the wig cost to ₵460). 17.5% (₵70) of Nana Adwoas’ revenue pays for transporting the product and the client incurs a cost of ₵130 (almost 30% of the ₵460) on the wig that he so dearly love.

With the existence of a poor postal service system, this has been the means by which young start-ups result to in delivering products to their customers. Shipping has been a financial burden for the young entrepreneur and startups across the country. The bag seller from Cape-Coast is facing the same problem with his customers, and so is the shoe seller from Takoradi.

Transporting product can cost from one-third to half of the total cost thereby reducing the patronage of online shops and setting the youth entrepreneur back to the unemployed population. Efficient delivery postal service is what made Amazon, Alibaba and other e-commerce possible but our postal service has not developed to attain the trust of the young entrepreneur and provide for him this very necessary service. To promote e-commerce and the youths’ entrepreneurial activities, the efficiency of the post office needs to be reviewed by improving on the processing time and resources of their various departments to reduce the cost of shipping products within the country and across the continent. The use of the GhanaPost GPS and mobile maps can be used to pinpoint the locations of the customer to reduce the amount spent on delivery service. Efficiency should be our hall mark in all our works to reduce the cost of work activities and the pollution cost on the environment.

The youth waits on the day our postal service will rise to their needs.