Surprisingly, the mFriday brand is associated wrongly by most people ONLY with developers and programmers writing long stretches of code and building applications in the process. This is a bit unfair to the business and administrative component of the mFriday culture. This component refers to the researchers, marketers, presenters, bloggers, teaching fellows, shepherds and the like in mFriday. It is this demographic that ensures that the work of developers and coders eventually see the light of day. They deserve a bit of credit for their work, don’t they?
It was by playing this role that I spent this past Saturday with Godwin, Desmond and Pierre. Godwin, Desmond and I stole time from our business training class and went with Pierre to visit an mFriday member at home. His mother was recuperating from surgery so we went to spend some time with them. This act of fellowship was very much appreciated by his entire family.
You should realize that Pierre had to also sacrifice some time from his “Saturday’s” workload. I’m not inciting anyone to be a truant at work but such sacrifice and show of affection and compassion helps us hammer the fact that mFriday is not just a technology hub but a socially responsible tech hub. All you have to do is visit the mFriday website (www.mfriday.org) and you will find a number of socially responsible activities that mFriday has and is planning to organize this year.
We later spent the day with Pierre at his home. We had a smoothie (Pierre makes really delicious smoothies) and discussed business ideas and solutions to various problems in the Ghanaian society. One of the numerous advices we received was to becoming better leaders than our elders because some of them only use their wealth to represent their titles (ie. They buy flashy cars and build multi-storey buildings) instead of making a socially responsible impact in the lives of the people around them.
If you were to have supper with Pierre, what will you eat? I’m sure you guessed everything but ampesi and nkontonmire stew. This is exactly what we had for supper. He even apologized for not having pear available with the dish. Is Pierre turning into a Ghanaian? He even knows the best fufu joint in Kumasi! If you don’t believe me ask him the next time you meet him. At the table, we asked him a bucket-load of questions about himself so we could turn out to be socially responsible people like the Co-founders of mFriday.
Later, over a cup of coffee (I’m talking about real Colombian coffee not the regular brand, you know what I’m talking about!), we discussed news items in that day’s newspaper. We talked about a lot of stuff from lavish lifestyles of Ghanaians to ways corporate entities used charitable gifts to lower their taxes. Never a dull moment when mFriday core group meet to discuss the future, right? When we finally got back to our business training session, the teams were still perfecting their presentations on their business models. At so late an hour, it will not be a marvel if in five years’ time all these people have budding companies who will employ their mates and help alleviate the escalating graduate unemployment rate!
