Partnership with Heritage Christian College in Ghana brings new opportunities for all

Students and professors bring light to the people of Ghana through academic expertise and the creation of microenterprises.

Courtney Grable and Janel Shoun-Smith  |  07/27/2023

This past spring, Lipscomb’s College of Business (COB) laid a foundation for the university to build on its ties in Ghana, Africa, bringing potential academic, economic and development benefits to Ghana as well as academic and experiential benefits to Lipscomb students.

Andy Borchers, professor of management, spent the spring 2023 semester on sabbatical teaching at Heritage Christian College in Accra, Ghana, and Jeff Cohu, associate professor of management and executive director of the Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation (CEI), led a first-time mission trip for Lipscomb students in May to work with Heritage students on developing micro-businesses.

While Lipscomb has sent students to an orphanage called Village of Hope in Ghana for the past 14 years, COB officials hope these two efforts will be the beginning of expanding Lipscomb student opportunities in Ghana beyond that one mission effort.

Borchers first encountered Heritage Christian College, a Christian university in Accra, sponsored by the Churches of Christ, two years ago when he met Samuel Twumasi-Ankrah, the college president, and other Heritage officials visiting Lipscomb during its Christian Scholars Conference.  

Heritage was established in 1982 as a two-year preacher training school by the Nsawam Road Church of Christ, Ghana. In 2001, Twumasi- Ankrah proposed transforming the school into an accredited liberal arts college. Today it is accredited by the Ghana Tertiary Education Commission offers degree programs in business, technology, religion and nursing and has more than 400 students enrolled. 

In its continuing efforts to grow, Heritage is working to lure credentialed visiting faculty from the U.S. to teach in their specialty areas. The college has built Western-style housing on-campus specifically for visiting faculty, said Borchers. He was the first to accept Heritage’s invitation to teach for a semester, but he hopes he is not the last, he said.

For Borchers, the sabbatical in Ghana was a time of renewal, allowing him to shift gears from administrative work back to teaching. For the Heritage students, they had an opportunity to learn entrepreneurship (a major focus at Heritage), cost accounting and ebusiness from a professor who has experience working at General Motors and who has received almost $2 million in grants to develop entrepreneurial education.

“There is a need to grow their economy and find a way forward, so every student at Heritage takes entrepreneurship classes and some even participate in a pitch competition where the first prize is about $8,000 American dollars.” 

Borchers, whose academic expertise also includes supply chain management, spent a great deal of time learning about Ghana’s supply chain challenges in hopes of building new partnerships with organizations. He spent time in meetings with business leaders and bankers, met members of Parliament and visited the country’s major container port. 

“It was an opportunity to learn about the challenges that West Africa has economically,” says Borchers. “Their roads aren’t as developed and transportation is so important. I now have a stronger perspective on what supply chain means in developing countries that don’t have reliable transportation systems.” 

As Borchers prepared to end his time in the country of Ghana, he used the knowledge and experience he gained all semester to help facilitate a group of College of Business students who arrived in May for an entrepreneurial mission trip. 

Cohu and Alexandria Arnette, assistant director and operations manager for Lipscomb’s CEI, led a group of six students on a mission trip to Ghana for three weeks. During their time, they worked with local entrepreneurs, including students at the college. 

“In entrepreneurial mission work, the goal is to use business coaching and mentoring to support Christians in other countries with economic development opportunities and to share our faith with those who are not Christians,” said Cohu. 

The team engaged students in hands-on learning opportunities that provided them with real-world experiences in marketing, business planning, forecasting and financial modeling.  

“Ghana has been through some very difficult economic times in the past two years,” said Cohu. “The country is experiencing hyperinflation and a major devaluation of their currency. As a result, almost everyone has to have a side business to help make a living.” 

With the informal economy of Ghana composed of mainly small businesses, subsistence entrepreneurship is critical for Ghanaians to survive in the current economic climate. “Heritage Christian College has made entrepreneurship training a major emphasis of their strategic plan. We were able to work with a student team that was preparing to compete in a global entrepreneurial pitch competition,” Cohu said. 

At the same time, the Lipscomb group learned about several different business models as well as the Ghanaian economy and business culture. “It was a good learning experience for everyone involved,” remarked Cohu. “I think we all came away with new insights. We were certainly blessed by everyone we were able to work with.”

The team worked with both existing business and business startup ideas. Several of the companies included a poultry farm, bakery, a greenhouse business and catfish farm. “This trip was the beginning of what will hopefully be many more opportunities for our College of Business students to use their business skills to help others in developing economies,” said Cohu. 

“We view business as a force of good whether in our own local community or throughout the world,” said COB Dean Ray Eldridge. “Providing these opportunities for students to use their business acumen to improve the lives of others is not only key for their own business education but for being God's hands and feet.”

In addition to the College of Business, several other Lipscomb faculty and students have or plan to visit Ghana in the upcoming months. In May, Dwayne Towell, associate professor of computing, led a group of students in the College of Engineering on a mission trip. The team worked with Village of Hope, but visited Heritage Christian College on a scouting trip to look at future project opportunities, said Borchers. Additionally, John Mark Hicks, professor of Bible, is scheduled to visit Ghana for more than a month starting in August.

Throughout his time in Ghana, Borchers wrote scholarly papers with faculty to present in the United States later this year. “I will be carrying the message to our faculty and to the Christian Business Faculty Association to ask them to come to Ghana for a semester,” he said. 

“We were blessed to combine Andy Borchers’ faculty sabbatical and Jeff Cohu’s missional entrepreneurship students to partner together for this five-month project,” said Eldridge. “Ghana and other global sites will continue to be a vital part of our mission to develop business leaders who embrace the values and virtues of Jesus.”

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