10 Ghanaian millionaires who built their wealth from very unexpected businesses

Ghana's richest people did not all start in boardrooms or inherit family empires. Many of the country's wealthiest figures began selling things on street corners, collecting scrap, or running businesses that raised eyebrows.

Here are ten Ghanaians whose unlikely starting points make their success stories almost unbelievable.

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Before he owned television stations, radio networks, water companies, banks, and insurance firms, Osei Kwame Despite was selling cassettes at Kantamanto in Accra. Despite is known to have started making money from his cassette-selling business. Before the days of CDs, the businessman was a distributor of Ghanaian films, and his joint in Accra's Opera Square was the hottest spot to get the latest Ghanaian film. That cassette hustle quietly grew into the Despite Group of Companies, which today runs UTV, Peace FM, Okay FM, Neat FM, and Hello FM, alongside water production companies, insurance companies, microfinance, and banking companies. Few origin stories in Ghanaian business are as quietly remarkable.

Daniel McKorley's story is one of the most dramatic in Ghanaian business history. He revealed in an interview: "I was once that boy selling bofrot and kerosene on the streets of La." He also worked as a trotro driver's mate, a pupil-teacher, a houseboy, and an office-to-office bookseller. After dropping out of the University of Ghana due to financial difficulties, he founded McDan Shipping Company in November 1999 with just one employee. Today, the McDan Group spans shipping, aviation, logistics, oil and gas, construction, security, and agribusiness, with a presence in over 2,000 major air and seaports worldwide. McKorley's alleged net worth sits between $600 million and $1 billion.

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When Nana Kwame Bediako's father gave him and his brother money to support their mother, his brother bought eggs and bread. Bediako bought a hen and a cock, and started a poultry business. That entrepreneurial instinct followed him to the UK, where things got even more unusual. After his car was repeatedly clamped in London, he took a clamp with him out of frustration, a friend expressed interest in buying it, and that sparked the idea of entering the scrap metal business. By age 21, he claimed to have made a million pounds through scrap trading and telecommunications, which he then used to invest in a nightclub back in Ghana that yielded $75,000. He flipped that profit into real estate and never looked back, eventually building Kwarleyz Group with over 500 residential units across Accra.

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Dr. Joseph Siaw Agyepong started from very humble beginnings selling exercise books in his mother's bookstore, but now owns a conglomerate spanning waste management, construction, financial services, manufacturing, and ICT, with footprints across Ghana, Africa, China, and the Middle East. The pivot that changed everything? A trip to China. It was in the mid-2000s when a trip to China introduced him to the tricycles that became emblematic of his waste management company, Zoomlion, that he had his greatest eureka moment, catapulting him from a modestly successful entrepreneur into a national icon with over 250,000 people on his payroll. What started as a small printing press in 1995 has grown into one of Ghana's most influential companies, now operating across all 16 regions of Ghana and in more than 24 African countries.

Dr. Kwaku Oteng built his empire on something many dismissed as village medicine. The millionaire's brainchild investment that shot him into wealth was his herbal medicine business, producing Angel Cream and other herbal products. From those humble herbal roots he expanded into broadcasting, beverages, and transport. He now owns Angel FM, a radio station he used to recount how he could never hold money for long before falling sick. The irony is that it was medicine, not markets, that made him his first millions.

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Ernesto Taricone, an Italian-born civil engineer who moved to Ghana with his family in 1968, started his first business importing and selling agricultural machinery. Few could have predicted that selling tractors and farm equipment would be the seed of what became the Trasacco Group, a diversified powerhouse in construction, real estate, agriculture, mining, and manufacturing. Today, Trasacco employs more than 3,500 people across multiple sectors and generates more than $60 million in annual turnover. Taricone is currently ranked as the richest person in Ghana.

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Rev. Gifty Lamptey's interest and passion for food saw her venture into the food processing business in 1990. She invested in exporting mushrooms, papaya, and pineapple to international markets. From mushrooms and tropical fruit, she pivoted into agro-processing and founded Sidalco Ltd with her late husband, now a pioneering market leader in liquid fertilizers in Ghana with sub-regional reach. She is considered one of the top three richest women in Ghana.

Patricia Poku-Diaby is the CEO of Plot Enterprise Ghana Limited, a cocoa processing company based in Takoradi, with a net worth of $720 million as of 2025, making her the richest woman in Ghana. In a country where cocoa farming is commonplace and often associated with subsistence rather than spectacular wealth, Poku-Diaby turned commodities trading and processing into a nine-figure fortune, proof that sometimes the unexpected wealth is in the most familiar crop.

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The late Alhaji Asuma Banda is the founder of the Antrak Group, establishing a logistics and transportation empire, with strategic investments that have facilitated trade and mobility across West Africa. What makes his story unexpected is the leap from ground logistics to aviation, a sector most Ghanaian entrepreneurs never dare enter. His willingness to move from trucks and freight into the skies built a reputation that few in West African business can match.

Alhaji Asuma Banda assed away on March 1, 2025, at the age of 92.

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Dr. Kofi Amoah is a businessman with diversified investments in banking, real estate, and entertainment. He played a key role in introducing Western Union to Ghana and is also known for his support of the local music and arts industries. Few people think of a money transfer agency as the foundation of a financial empire, but that single distribution deal with Western Union gave Amoah the leverage and the capital to branch out into an empire spanning finance, entertainment, and beyond.

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From a young man selling cassettes on the streets of Dunkwa-Offinso to a boy who bought two hens instead of bread and eggs, the stories behind Ghana's wealthiest figures are filled with grit, vision, and sometimes miraculous turnarounds. The common thread is not the business they started, it is the refusal to stay in it. Every name on this list used an unlikely first hustle as a launchpad, not a destination.