Jesse Roland Prah: Meet the young Ghanaian graduate cultivating 300 acres of rice in Takoradi
- Jesse Roland Prah is a youth entrepreneur and rice farmer
- The Takoradi-based rice farmer is a graduate of the University of Education, Winneba
- Prah talks about his journey to becoming a household rice brand in Takoradi with the Takoradi Innovation Center Hub
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Though Jesse Roland Prah originally did not set out to be an entrepreneur or farmer, he has become one of the few successful locally produced rice brands in Takoradi in the Western Region.
The chief executive officer of Roland Rice stumbled on farming when the opportunity presented itself.
Roland Rice is a domestic rice brand grown, milled, processed, and packaged in Takoradi and comes in different packages.
Recounting his success story in an interview with the Takoradi Innovation Center (TIC) Hub, he disclosed he struggled with joblessness after his national service.
Prah earned a degree from the University of Education, Winneba, and originally trained to become a teacher but there was no school for him to be placed in at the time.
After a desperate job search, he finally landed a supervisory role with a company that was looking for engineers to supervise a rice farming project in the Shama District.
Despite his background in education, he applied for the job.
''My employers could see from my CV that I had no engineering background, however, I insisted that I could do the job when I was called. Thankfully, I had earlier done some internships which saved me. I was given the job,'' he said.
Before his contract ended, Prah secured a piece of land from the locals to start his rice farm to avoid being jobless again.
Now, Roland cultivates a 300-acre rice farm, mills, processes, and bags his local rice by himself.
Prah's dream is to scale up the business to employ more young people.
Watch the interview below.
In a separate story, at 15, Holali Ativor discovered that she was born with ambiguous genitalia but little did she know that it would derail her dream of playing football at the national level.
Essilfie Abraham: Student of Takoradi Technical Institute builds Africa's 1st excavator that uses water as fuel
In 2019, she lost a chance to play for the Black Queens because she failed to meet the team's gender requirement after a medical examination by a doctor at the Ghana Football Association (GFA) indicated that she is intersex.
Though Ativor considers herself a woman, football stakeholders do not think so.
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Source: YEN.com.gh