A trading company, and the people in it

Latlink Enterprise is based in Techiman, in the Bono East region, which sits where the forest belt meets the savanna and where a great deal of Ghana's produce changes hands. We buy there, we store there, and we move goods out through the ports to buyers abroad.

The company does two things that look separate and are not. On one side we source agricultural commodities and sell them on, mostly for processing. On the other we supply everyday consumer goods to shops and wholesalers across the country. The same trucks, the same relationships and the same roads serve both. How the distribution side works.

None of that is complicated to describe. It is difficult to do consistently, which is the whole of our argument: buying at the collection point rather than through brokers, checking every batch rather than every shipment, and having the paperwork ready before anyone asks for it.

Techiman matters to what we do. The market here is one of the largest in West Africa, and it sits at the point where produce from the northern savanna meets the road south. A great deal of what leaves Ghana passes through this junction, which means we buy where the crop actually is rather than at the end of a chain that has already taken its cut.

We are a small company and we say so plainly. That has costs: we cannot take every order, and there are volumes we would have to decline. It also has an advantage a larger firm cannot easily copy, which is that the person who agreed your price is the person who will answer when you call about it. Who runs the company.