Business & Enterprise
Landmark
Kwabena Darko
born 1943
Built Ghana's largest privately owned agro-industrial business
Landmark is level 2 of 4 in the Ghana Hall of Fame: a first that opened a door, or the pre-eminent figure of their generation in this country. See how the levels work.
Why they are here
Darko Farms made him the biggest private agro-industrialist in Ghana and a name in world poultry — and he stood for president along the way.
Kwabena Darko started with a few hundred birds at Akropong in the Ashanti Region in the 1960s and built Darko Farms into the largest privately owned poultry and agro-industrial business in Ghana — hatcheries, feed mills, processing, and a distribution network reaching most of the country, at a scale that put him into Who's Who in World Poultry.
He did it through the years when Ghanaian manufacturing was being squeezed flat by price controls, currency collapse and coups, which is the part other Ghanaian businesspeople point to.
He also helped build the institutions around him rather than only his own firm: he was a founder of Ghana's rural banking movement and of the microfinance network Sinapi Aba Trust, which lends to traders and smallholders who no bank would look at, and he chaired boards across Ghanaian industry.
He stood for president in the 1992 election, the first of the Fourth Republic, and afterwards went back to farming and to the argument that Ghana's food imports are a policy choice rather than a fact of nature.
He did it through the years when Ghanaian manufacturing was being squeezed flat by price controls, currency collapse and coups, which is the part other Ghanaian businesspeople point to.
He also helped build the institutions around him rather than only his own firm: he was a founder of Ghana's rural banking movement and of the microfinance network Sinapi Aba Trust, which lends to traders and smallholders who no bank would look at, and he chaired boards across Ghanaian industry.
He stood for president in the 1992 election, the first of the Fourth Republic, and afterwards went back to farming and to the argument that Ghana's food imports are a policy choice rather than a fact of nature.
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