In this interview, the program Director of the Grow With Us Fellowship sat down with our grant awardee- Sedinam Ameku. She is a young woman from Ghana who is working towards equipping the young women of Ghana with the necessary financial literacy skills. She hopes that by doing this, she will in one way or another assist in alleviating poverty.
At only 25 (Almost 25) she has managed to do so much and it is such an honor to get to sit with her, speak with her as she gives glimpses of her journey as an entrepreneur. The Grow With Us Fellowship has so far had 24 women successfully complete their year long fellowship with us and Sedinam was one of them, in our 2020 class.
Enjoy the interview.
Tell us more about yourself, what you do and how you do it and everything in between.
I am a financial literacy and inclusion advocate. I believe I am a financial guru, a personal finance guru , And all I want to do is to help women, especially understand their finances, just understand the concepts and then practice them. I believe this is one sure way for them to escape poverty, get a way to cater for themselves and also enable them to have a voice of their own.
How are you here right now, this young as a Personal Finance Guru
Okay. I was a spendthrift (both laughing) . Like I just couldn’t keep money. I got lots of gifts for people, from my family. Anytime someone visited the person had to give me something because I was that lovely little girl. but, I never knew how to manage my money, not at all. And my parents never taught me that that is one truth. Um, it’s just like a typical African period, not telling & teaching the girl child to save, but, it happened that in the university, there was a program that went on and there were some NGOs that came around. And I mean, I saw that they were doing marvelous things. So I asked myself, how am I contributing to my community? How am I contributing to Ghana? And then I said to myself, no, I have to start something. What is my passion? What do I want to do? So, I started volunteering to teach kids mathematics and it was mainly in the finance aspect. But, after service I came home and I found something, I wanted to do something I was passionate about. Seeing a group of Ghanian women queuing for loans and getting to learn that they did this oftenly steered me in the right direction.
Sedinam please tell us more about how all this led to the formation of your organization. What it does & how you do it everyday.
The organization is called Females & Finance organization. I founded it in 2018 and officially got it registered in 2019. So what we do is organize programs and initiatives that bring these women together to teach them about savings,book keeping, investments, just general, financial
management practices. I believe by doing this we help reduce poverty, which is widespread & I believe financial illiteracy is a contributor to this and so in our own way we aim to assist in reducing it. We are centered in the greater Accra region and some parts of the east region. Hopefully we are looking to expand to the other regions of Ghana.
Do you have a background in Finance? Do you think a background in finance assists in your world?
So I studied insurance in Actuarial Science. Here I learnt how to manage risk so yes I believe that counts as a finance background. But I’m self-taught when it comes to personal finance though I have had the opportunity to undertake a couple of courses in finance, financial services, financial management, financial inclusion from, the chartered Institute for securities and investment. On the question if this helps I would say, I think it does because, once you are passionate about something, you need to get prepared, to unleash it, to share it so these courses actually prepared me, I know what to tell people when I meet them. I know how to approach them because I understand the technicalities and the concept of what I preach. So I think it comes handy . Like it helps you, it helps you go beyond passion and it helps you help other people you want to help. So I think it’s necessary.
Okay. Then comes the part where, you know, you have all this knowledge and you need to decimate it, you need to share it. You need to make it available. And you know, money is a very sensitive topic. I feel, especially in Africa culture. And I can only speak about African culture because that’s the only thing that I’m exposed to money, money makes people uncomfortable. So I’m just wondering how, how you work with this, how you get to a place where you are able to tell people, you know what, I know this, how do you even start the conversation one Because that is already a bottleneck that nobody wants to speak about how much they earn, how much they’re saving, how much they are in debt.There’s also the additional layer that your TA is women whom we know that patriarchy limits their access to finance and generally all resources
it, wasn’t easy. It wasn’t easy. So I talked about the first program that I put together. It wasn’t easy even getting these women out there because we’ve never had somebody come to them saying, I want to talk about how you manage your money. It’s so weird to them, like who cares about whether you make money or not, who cares or that you spend your money or not? Who cares? No one cares about that. But one thing, putting them together and not approaching them one-on-one is one method I use. So if you’re with somebody, one-on-one, the person doesn’t know where you are coming from. And the person doesn’t know what you do. Even outside of the introduction, the brain doesn’t understand what you see. I am a financial literacy and inclusion advocate, even literate. You say it and how to repeat yourself and explain what you do.
So these women, you can just imagine how difficult it is expressing what you do to them. But the best way, one way that we use is to put them together as a group. So why put them together
as a group, you are able to take your message out there. Clearly once you tell the leader, you’re able to get to them easily for their leaders. She was able to explain to them that this is what I do. I am interested in these women managing their money, the money they make, how does she manage it? When they go home, balance it with family, life and family expenses. And then they buy into the idea like, oh, this is good for women.uch, they have to start saving, then come and talk to them. So that is what I do. So, and if I want to meet people one-on-one too, um, I started the conversation.
It also started by buying from them, for example, a woman at my station. She sells bread with salad. I got here. And what, where from here, I became her friend and then one day after talking about finance And, also, um, social media has helped. So I get people messaging me because of what I post and all of that messaging me. Hi, how can I manage my money? And then you take quizzes, step-by-step go do this way. You come back another, put another step, do this way, come back another step. So I think, um, meeting them as a group has gone really better than one-on-one encounters. So that’s why we get to talk to these women about money. So they don’t feel secure. They don’t feel like I’m trying to get into their immediate personal lives and they have other people also listening to the same message. So, yeah.
Most entrepreneurs always have to finance their dream with other side hustles. Is that the same case for you?
That’s a really tough question to answer. So I, um, it’s my passion and it’s my job but aside from that I have some side hustles that I paid off that have held me through the rough times with this organization. So a lot of things actually came, uh, lots of program funding came from my pocket and, um, with the support of friends and family, um, and they would do quite a lot, quite a lot. So my side businesses, those pay more than females and finance, but I still believe in the vision, I believe in the dream. And I know one day, it’s going to pay off.
I totally agree with you, And I know for sure that the work you have started to do in Ghana is very, very important work, It’s work that needs to be done. It pushes our goal as an organization in achieving economic justice across the continent one woman at a time and we are happy that through you we get to realize this dream get closer and achievable.
Sedinam, you were awarded our first ever grant. I am now wondering how that makes you feel. How do you think that is going to help your work? What exactly do you intend to do, moving forward
Yeah. You can see I’m smiling already. Yeah. I had said that it would come in handy that I love money, but fortunately this money is not mine.I am happy. I’m really happy about this. We’ve never gotten grants before. Thank you. Thank you. And I don’t think this came on a silver platter. No, it didn’t. It was, it was, it was lots of work and going into it to get to that. And, um, uh, I’m happy. I’m happy. I’m happy. I don’t know how to express it, but I’m happy. Yes. I’m also
I think, changes a lot in the organization and it is a step in the right direction. The reason being that there is a project that is pending, the project for which we got the grant and that is a project we really want to undertake. But the funding was an issue and we believed that we were able to
do that in one school, we could replicate it in other schools, but where was the funding to even do it in one school. But this award here, this grant here can and will, change a lot, we can have the program in a selected school. And then we have evidence, something we can present and say, Hey, we did this in this school. We have to replicate it in the other schools.
Okay. Tell us more about this project please. What is this project called? What is it about, what does it need to achieve? You know, you’ve mentioned schools. How did that come in?
Okay. So it’s called Girl money Kits. It’s much more than money. So this it’s a kit. It’s going to be a bag or a kit. That’s going to contain, financial infographic, financial personal finance, Manual, personal budget, and a personal financial plan. So we want to teach these ladies young. We don’t want to wait before we come to them, telling them about money. By then, a lot has changed for them. But at this younger age, if we give them the opportunity to understand their finances, they go with it. So we are looking at helping our beneficiaries from form one.
The first level of high school, we want to present them with these kits and then monitor them till they get to their final year in school. So it’s gonna be a three year program. But,most of it will just be monitoring, just making sure that they’re making good use of the personal finance infographic manuals.
So this is just preparation towards the future because it has to come down to habits. If you don’t learn something, now you can’t practice it in the future.
It is very difficult for most of us because it’s not something we have practiced from a younger age.
I get that. Now you’ve mentioned that access to funding has been quite a hurdle and I think every enterprise can tell you the same story, even us at Choose Yourself. It was quite a struggle, getting people to take a chance on us being an organization with very young women who are radical feminists doesn’t help either. They have a point that there is so much for all of us to learn, but I think at the same time, we also need people to take chances on us, you know, with the lessons that we need to catch up on with the experience that we need to acquire.So besides funding what other challenges have you faced?
Yeah so this comes down to the organization. So people see me, and say you must be super, super rich. And that is not the case like people believe that someone who doesn’t have so much money cannot be teaching them about money and that has been a really big challenge for me.
But I think that we should all go on this journey together and no one has to be left behind. I am on the journey you are too , so why don’t we go together? And, aside from that then people opening up to you, it’s a really big challenge, as you mentioned. Yeah. It’s a really big challenge to get people to open up to you. And, some organizations find it difficult to work with you because it is, it’s a sort of, not a tangible good, it’s sort of like, it’s very difficult to explain money, even though it’s something we can touch.
Also where we come from It’s a really big taboo to talk about money worse yet somebody else’s money. And also the men, the men, this stand in the way asking why we are talking about money to their wives? Because they feel they will be exposed in one way or the other. And I think that it’s coming from their ego, which is so wrong. They don’t want to accept the fact that even though they’re married, their wives also have money to save and have money to make for themselves. They don’t want to have this kind of fight. So they don’t give you the chance to even talk to their wives.
Oh! It is very difficult to navigate entrepreneurship as a woman. Dealing with the usual challenges but also the added layer of gender adds more and I hope that changes. Tell us about some of your proudest moments
Wow. I think I’ve not been grateful enough. Looking back. I have done quite a lot of things you have. Getting to speak to queen mothers here in Ghana, queen mothers sit in bounds of about 60 and they sit down to listen to you. Leading a team to present a petition to the minister of finance. Oh, I think, I feel proud and grateful to God about that. I think that we, as entrepreneurs, have to be grateful to God all the time and we have to celebrate ourselves, look back and acknowledge all of it.
Yeah. You know, I am so grateful I got a chance to meet you and listen to you speak, and I can tell you that you have done so much with us already. And as an organization, we are extremely proud of your work. We are proud to be associated with you. And we are proud that Ghana has you. Ghana should be singing celebrations to have you. It should be. You’re doing amazing, incredible, and vital work at the moment. And we are very, very, very proud of you. it’s breathtakingly inspiring to look at somebody, turn nothing into something,
All we had was a dream and a community, and that’s the truth. And I think that’s the same for you too.
Carole Mumbe
GWU Program Director
