My volunteer experience in Ghana | From concrete jungles to concrete ceilings.

I always thought that volunteering in Africa meant building houses, educating in schools, or delivering food to remote areas. Well here's the thing. I have Ikea furniture which I bought 3 years ago still sitting in the boxes I brought them home in, my mind shutters at the at the thought of going back to school in any capacity nowadays, and I get my food delivered to my front door through a series of apps.

I don't build. I don't do school. I don't deliver food.

Don't get me wrong, I applaud and admire endlessly the efforts underway and people devoting their time and lives volunteering in those ways. But I’ve often questioned what I could bring to the table. What I could do of value to help the number of socioeconomic issues facing Africa?

I engineer. I market. I story tell. That's what I do. (And I yoga, but that's a post for another day)

So when I travelled 7000+ miles to volunteer in Accra, Ghana, I did it to do what I do best. Through MySkills4Afrika - an organization bringing skilled people to support Africa's future - I partnered with eSolutions Ghana, a company who empowers people and organizations in Africa to modernize the way they work by building on  Microsoft technology.

Instead of building, schooling, or delivering, I facilitated a series of workshops with their CEO and product development teams. I used a methodology called 'Scan, Focus, and Act' to uncover the company's 'Why? How? And What?'. From there I lead the team to segment the audiences of who uses/who buys their solutions and crafted tailored stories and feature-pitches to each of those audiences.

If you're an old colleague from Capgemini, one of my mentors/mentees, or from my Microsoft family, I hope you picked up on the use of the ASE, Simon Sinek, and Surface marketing methodologies in there. But if you we're reading that and it seems like mumbo jumbo here's the summary: We positioned the company's product offerings to drive stronger value conversations and increased sales. We stopped trying to push a product that was everything to everyone, and became crisp on who the product is truly for and focused the sales motion accordingly. It's a problem that largest corporations in the world face today and what the successful ones do well. I know this because I work for one.

I am extremely proud of what we accomplished last week. Yet they were all accomplishments that I would expect. Because like I said… I engineer. I market. I story tell. And I do those things well.

Here's what I didn't expect, what I took away from my experience, and what I hope I can inspire you to takeaway:

Those accomplishments were a mere dent in a concrete ceiling that sits atop the African market and people working in it. Not a glass ceiling, a concrete ceiling. See a glass ceiling is the metaphoric invisible barrier that keeps a demographic from rising beyond a certain level. We call it invisible because some people don't see it, some don't notice it and some don't acknowledge it's there. But there's nothing invisible about Africa's barrier. Like I said, there are admirable people out there, devoting their lives to building, schooling, delivering, vaccinating - devoting their lives to shattering this barrier. Everyone can see it, everyone notices it, everyone acknowledges that it's there - it's concrete.

What I didn't expect, what's hard to truly understand until you're immersed in and working there, is what's beneath that concrete ceiling. The people. These are the most hard working and passionate people who I've ever had the fortune of meeting. These are people who are creating and innovating at speeds that parallel the western world despite that concrete barrier. I'd like to say that these are people like me, but this is a level of hard work that comes from a place where hard work is the only option. And a passion that comes from chipping away a cement ceiling every day. This is hard work and passion on a whole new level.

In at least one way, these are people like me. We are black. And getting to spend a week working alongside a team of black colleagues was an unexpected reminder. I'd ballpark that I have 3-5 meetings on any given day. That's 780-1300 meetings a year. Yet, the last time I remember being in a meeting room with another black person was 10 months ago. The last time I remember a black person being in my management or leadership chain was 6 years ago. So walking into and working in a room with a black CEO and black team of product developers, a room where I was one of many not the only one, was an unexpected reminder that this could be me. It's one thing to aspire to be a leader in an organization but it's another to be inspired by seeing a person like you actually doing it. To paraphrase the ever-knowledgeable Beyoncé, it was a reminder that I very well "could be a black Bill Gates in the making"

Yes I'm proud of the accomplishments we delivered in my time in Ghana, but I almost feel guilty taking away more than what I gave. I'm taking away time working alongside hard working, passionate, people like me. It's raised my own bar for what hard work means, what passion means, and it's reminded me of what I can achieve. The experience has left me more fired up and ready to go after the unimaginable.

So that's my big takeaway, here's my advice:

Go spend time with people like you, and put a dent a ceiling you care about shattering.

That's not to say people of the same race or gender, though if that's what you're passionate about - go for it. Go spend and volunteer time with people who you have shared passions with. So you can add fuel that passion, so you can break barriers together, so you can be a reminder for each other of what's possible through the art of collaboration.