Check this new book out!!

eShopaAfrica would like to thank Sarah Murray for writing about us and the unique Ga coffins of Ghana in her new book "Making an Exit: From the Magnificent to the Macabre -- How we dignify our dead. Check it out on Amazon!

Media: Beers of the World: Coffin Clever

Beers of the World:  Coffin Clever

In the April/May 07 edition of Beers of the World magazine our beer coffins scored a hit. The piece reminds us that Homer Simpson dreams of being buried in a beer coffin - Homer - eShopAfrica can make your dream come true!

April/May 07


Order your own Ga chest from the eShopAfrica.com online shop:


Find out more in this book:

Going into Darkness: Fantastic Coffins from Africa

Media: National Geographic: African Crafts

National Geographic: African Crafts, September 2005

eShopAfrica.com This Ghana based fair trade website helps African craftspeople build their businesses by offering products ranging from kente cloth and other textiles to custom-made coffins. Profits help pay for education and health care.

Order your own Ga chest from the eShopAfrica.com online shop:


Find out more in this book:

Going into Darkness: Fantastic Coffins from Africa

The Economist mentions our Nokia coffin

The Economist 10 Mar 2005
Our Nokia Mobile Phone coffin was mentioned in the Technology Quarterly of the Economist in a piece about the sprituality of mobile phones. Read the article or see the photos of the Nokia Mobile Phone coffin being made in the eShopAfrica.com coffin gallery

Media: Fortune Small Business Magazine: Coffins to Die For

In Ghana what you do in life determines the style of your burial. The Ga tribe, located in the country's capital Accra, models coffins to reflect their occupants hobbies and occupations from peacocks for bird lovers to airplanes for pilots. Now five-year-old exporter eShopAfrica.com is giving the burial vessels new life above ground in the living rooms of Europe and America. British-born founder Cordelia Salter, spent two decades in Africa in technology development before moving to Rome, where she decided to start a company that would give Ghanaian artisans an escape from exploitive practices. "One artist we use, Samuel Naah, paid off his apprentice fees with two commissions from us. Now he has his own business," says Salter.


Feb 05




Order your own Ga chest from the eShopAfrica.com online shop:


Find out more in this book:

Going into Darkness: Fantastic Coffins from Africa

Media: FHM Magazine: Getaway Caskets

All the fun of a funeral in Ghana without ever having to live there. No-one knows where we go when we die. If it's LA though, you're going to need a set of wheels. Thanks to coffin-makers in Ghana, the dead can now take to the afterlife in a hand-carved Ferrari, Subaru or whatever they fancy.

"Ghana's Ga people bury their dead in coffins that represent the life of the deceased," says Cordelia Salter-Nour of eShopAfrica.com, the business that's bringing Ghana's best to the West. The designs come in full, half and table top models. "Half size is a children's coffin," Salter says.

But do Westerners want to spend eternity in a giant phone? "Sure they do," Salter insists. One customer wants to be buried in a peacock so ordered her own coffin.  June 2004

Order your own Ga chest from the eShopAfrica.com online shop:


Find out more in this book:

Going into Darkness: Fantastic Coffins from Africa

Media: Playboy Magazine: Fatal Distraction - Going in Style

Playboy Magazine:  Fatal Distraction - Going in Style


Crazy caskets cheer up the grimmest of reapers. If you sell shoes for a living, you may as well step into the hereafter in a giant wingtip. At least that's the thinking in Ghana, where a coffin is the last word in style. Fifty years ago* a Ghanaian angler shipped off in a seven foot fish and started a trend; today there's an endless variety of silly, folk-arty things on the market. Cabdrivers are buried in wooden taxis, preachers in Bible-shaped boxes and suds lovers in beer bottles. Want your own? eShopAfrica.com can help get you one for your living room.   June 2004.

Order your own Ga chest from the eShopAfrica.com online shop:


Find out more in this book:

Going into Darkness: Fantastic Coffins from Africa

Media: Boating Magazine: Boating for Eternity

Boating Magazine: Boating for Eternity
We know boating is your life - obviously - so spend the hereafter in a coffin built to resemble your boat. Morbid? Yes. Better than anything your family will pick out for you? Absolutely.

In the tradition of the Ga people of Ghana, who are buried in a coffin that reflects how they lived, eShopAfrica.com will build you a specially carved coffin for $1,000. Just send the company a picture of your boat and your final resting place will be completed in four to six weeks. If you're the consummate angler, you can choose one of the many fish styles from the eShopAfrica.com's current roster of 22 decorated coffins and chests or send them a picture of your 1,000 pound trophy blue marlin and they will carve to order. Now you can truly sleep with the fishes.


Oct 2003

Order your own Ga chest from the eShopAfrica.com online shop:


Find out more in this book:

Going into Darkness: Fantastic Coffins from Africa

Media: BBC Top Gear Magazine: Box-ters

BBC Top Gear Magazine: Box-sters

A few A few years ago, we featured the carpenters in Accra who create bespoke conveyances for that final journey. The lion used to be the most respected coffin, but the symbol of choice is now... 





Mar 03

Media: BBC: African crafts go online

This article about eShopAfrica.com was published on the BBC website:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/2688323.stm

Order your own Ga chest from the eShopAfrica.com online shop:


Find out more in this book:

Going into Darkness: Fantastic Coffins from Africa

Media: BBC: African crafts go online

Traditional African craftsmen are starting to sell their wares to collectors on the other side of the globe, thanks to...

Read this article

Media: Wall Street Journal: Industry Combats Cheap Knockoffs

MICHAEL M. PHILLIPS, Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, 15 Jul 2002

ACCRA, Ghana -- On the Printex Ltd. textile-factory floor is a closed door bearing a sign that reads: "Out of bounds. Anyone seen entering without permission will be severely dealt with."

Printex managers have good reason to be careful. Behind the door, a team of designers comes up with more than 500 copyrighted patterns a year for the colorful African fabrics that are the staple of Ghanaian fashion, and textile pirates are itching to see the new designs.

The sooner the new models go public, the sooner textile makers in China, Pakistan, Nigeria, India and Ivory Coast will make cheap copies of the most popular ones, smuggle them back into Ghana and snatch Printex's customers.

"We maintain strict secrecy until the point of production," says Printex executive Sujit Menon. "We keep everything under lock and key."

It is a bitter twist on the usual international dispute over intellectual-property rights, in which someone in a poor nation copies the products of a corporation in a wealthy country. Instead, Ghana's is a story of the poor stealing from the poor, with local manufacturers finding their copyrights pirated by companies in other developing countries.

Once the new Ghanaian designs are released, it is only a matter of a few months _ if not weeks _ before knockoffs appear. The four local textile producers figure piracy and smuggling cost them about two-thirds of the $150 million annual local market, a sharp blow in a country with relatively little indigenous industry and an average annual income of just $400.

Printex, which employs 400 Ghanaians, operates out of a Dickensian expanse of screening cylinders, steaming irons, huge rolls of raw cotton cloth and snaking tubes of dye. Sweat-drenched workers in flip-flops splash through puddles as they weave fabric, screen on designs, and cut it into 12-yard pieces.

Printex, which has about $20 million in annual sales, supplies printed cloth to wholesalers, who then distribute it to market women, who by tradition are the majority of textile dealers, all over this West African nation.

Ghana's textile market is fickle, with women buying the latest designs for dresses or head wraps. About a quarter of the new patterns from Printex's secret design room will sell well. Once the fabrics hit the market, the company hires student models to show them off, such as in ads on billboards and television. A winner could be produced in runs of as many as 300,000 yards. The rest will die after runs of just 3,000 yards.

Printex produces only screened textiles generically called "fancy prints." Some other companies, such as the Dutch textile maker Vlisco BV, also sell more expensive batik-like fabrics printed using a wax process. Each design is copyrighted, and, in theory, protected for 15 years. In fact, some don't last that many days before they are copied by pirate factories, industry executives say.

The fakes aren't hard to spot. They tend to be made of flimsier, less regular fabric, often synthetic such as rayon, instead of cotton. The colors don't always line up with the shapes. Some manufacturers print their name on the edge, but many sport a slightly altered logo from one of the famous brands, such as Printex, Vlisco or its local subsidiary, Ghana Textile Printing Ltd.

Ghana Textile Printing's distributor keeps a warehouse of new fabric on the edge of Makola market, Accra's commercial heart. Next door is a storefront of wholesaler S.K. Owusu, who sells the cloth to the women who run retail stalls in the market itself.

Ms. Owusu displays a certificate of merit presented by Ghana Textile Printing and the Vlisco Group for her work selling their wares. But on a rack on her wall at the moment is a bolt of gold cloth with a green star burst, with a close imitation of the Vlisco logo on the edge.

"It's not Vlisco," she concedes to Cecil Evans-Chinery, the district sales manager for Ghana Textile Printing's distributor. "It's supplied to me through Togo."

But, she explains, the vendors and their customers are demanding lower-price goods. She sells six yards of the fake for 75,000 cedis, or about $10. A GTP version would cost twice as much, and a Vlisco wax original 280,000 cedis, or nearly $40.

Mr. Evans-Chinery says he can't get too angry. He knows times are tough, and that Ms. Owusu has debts.

The pirates keep costs low in part by copying only designs that are already selling well; apparently the pirates are tipped off by the market women. So there is tension in the air as Mr. Evans-Chinery strolls through Makola's textile section; stall after stall is lined with smuggled cloth from China, Nigeria, Ivory Coast and elsewhere. The market women know him well, and suspect he either wants to raise prices or turn the women in. For their part, they say if Ghana Textile Printing turned out less expensive products, they wouldn't sell counterfeits.

"Everybody wants something cheap," Mr. Evans-Chinery sighs.

Ghanaian officials, under pressure from industry, are increasingly worried by the flood of foreign fabric. But it is the smuggling, not the copyright infringement, they find really troubling. Imported textiles are subject to a 20 percent tariff, and _ if industry estimates are correct _ that means the smuggling costs the government about $20 million in lost revenue.

The government's first instinct was to fight back at the retail level. Some months ago, officials summoned 1,500 Accra market women to the National Theater and warned them a crackdown was coming. "They know who the smugglers are," says Julia Anokye, senior industrial-promotion officer at the Ministry of Trade and Industry.

About a month later, customs police conducting a series of market raids seized smuggled goods and arrested a handful of textile dealers. A group of angry market women stomped to the Ministry of Trade and Industry and demanded an audience with the minister, which they eventually got.

"There was an uproar," a Ms. Anokye concedes.

Much of the pirated material comes through the port in Togo, next door on the Gulf of Guinea. Then, industry executives say, it is trucked north, where there is less border supervision, and smuggled into Ghana, past poorly paid, easily bribed customs officers.

Milad Millet, director of family-owned Printex, tries to stay ahead of the pirates by changing designs constantly, and by keeping his new patterns under tight wraps. Cordelia Salter, who runs an African-goods retail Web site called eShopAfrica.com here, recently approached Mr. Millet about displaying his products online. Thinking of the pirates, he turned her down flat. "All they've got to do," says Mr. Millet, "is log on, see the new designs and say, Start printing, boys!"

Copyright WSJ updated Jul 15, 2002 Write to Michael M. Phillips at michael.phillips@wsj.com

Media: Wall Street Journal: Ghana's Tech Frontier

MICHAEL M. PHILLIPS, Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, 22 May 2002

ACCRA, Ghana -- Mark Davies wants to make serious money and help Africa join the 21st century at the same time. The only catch: His plan might be illegal.

Mr. Davies, a Welsh-born American and a dot-com millionaire, is the founder of BusyInternet, which provides Internet access to Ghanaians. By any standard, the company is already a tremendous African success story. Started with $1.7 million from Mr. Davies and local financiers, BusyInternet has positive cash flow after only seven months in business. But Mr. Davies has bigger ideas: Internet phone calls, which the Ghanaian government currently doesn't permit.

Many foreign investors believe that if Ghana permitted Internet calls, the desperately poor country could become a hub of call centers for companies in the West, a high-tech development path cut by India. "If they can export digital goods and services ... they can easily compete with India and other places," says Jim Moore, an expert on Internet development at Harvard Law School. "A relatively modest market share can do a lot for these countries because they are so poor."

One of the businesses piggybacking on BusyInternet's infrastructure, eShopAfrica.com sells colorful, hand-carved coffins. The government of Ghana, like those in other sub-Saharan countries, has a vested interest in protecting the revenue of the state telephone company. It hasn't ruled out Internet calls but is taking its time to study the matter. "Nobody knows whether voice transmission across the Internet is legal or not," says Mr. Davies, whose plans are on hold while the government ponders the legal issues. In the meantime, risk takers here plunge ahead and dare the government to stop them. And the unlucky among them end up in jail.

Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, who arrived in Ghana Monday night, wants the government to remove barriers to foreign high-tech investment. English-speaking Ghana is a prime candidate for such development. The year-old government of President John Kufuor has promised to be more business-friendly than that of his military predecessor, Flight Lt. Jerry Rawlings. For now, though, starting a high-tech company here is anything but easy, as Mr. Davies can attest.

Mr. Davies, 38 years old, came to Ghana seeking to recapture the sense of adventure that characterized the early U.S. dot-com gold rush. In New York, he was a founder of Citysearch.com (www.citysearch.com), which merged with Ticketmaster and earned him a small fortune before he left in 1998. After starting and selling another tech venture, he spent four months in 1999 traveling across West Africa, landing in Accra with an idea for an Internet cafe that would serve not only as a place for ordinary Ghanaians to dabble in Web sites and e-mail, but also as an incubator for other Internet entrepreneurs needing space, infrastructure and moral support.

If Mr. Davies longed for that frontier experience, he picked the right place. He and partner Alex Rousselet, a 45-year-old Frenchman with long experience in the African oil industry, soon discovered they couldn't take even the simplest things for granted here. Electricity in Accra cuts out at least once a week, so they needed a $30,000 backup generator, and a huge battery to keep the computers up and running for 11 minutes until the generator kicks in. Then there is the $18,000 transformer out back; at times the 240-volt power can surge to 290 volts. The computers require frequent cleaning because of the dust that blows down from the Sahara. Customers steal toilet paper, apparently to sell on the street.

Minutes after Mr. Davies wired $150,000 for the lease on the building, a former gas-bottling plant, an elderly neighbor informed him that it was actually her property and that rights to it were in litigation. After a panicked phone call, he stopped the wire transfer, but it took three weeks to confirm his lease was valid. Customs held his satellite dishes for two months.

Embracing local customs, Mr. Davies arranged for a Ga tribal chief to bless the construction site with a bottle of imported schnapps. But even a tribal blessing can only go so far. Ghana Telecom, the virtual phone monopoly, has still installed only 15 of the 30 lines he ordered. The entire country has just 249,000 phone lines, for a population of 20 million.

Despite the obstacles, BusyInternet caught on. The company employs 50 people, and some 1,500 customers pay roughly $1 an hour to use the Internet each day; additional revenue comes from a copy center, meeting rooms, a restaurant and bar, movies, lectures and rent from start-ups who piggyback on the infrastructure BusyInternet has assembled.

Along the upstairs hall, a pair of Dutch Web site designers wait for Ghanaian companies to awaken to the power of the Internet. A business called eShopAfrica.com (www.eShopAfrica.com) sells Africana online. Products include hand-carved Ga coffins that are shaped like airplanes, shoes and howitzers, all designed to reflect the earthly interests of the recently deceased.

Another business, Data Management International Inc., of Wilmington, Del., employs 37 Ghanaians to process environmental fines for the City of New York. The Ghanaians type in data from computer images of citations handed out to hot-dog vendors caught smoking while serving, homeowners who leave trash on the sidewalk or ice-cream trucks nabbed selling cones in a crosswalk. The fines often far exceed the $72 that the average DMI clerk earns each month.

Messrs. Davies and Rousselet plan to open branches in other African cities. In Accra, they figure they have run into revenue limits surmountable only if the government authorizes them to sell customers Internet phone calls.

At a technology trade fair last week, Mr. Davies met Trevor Dearman, chief operating officer of Denwa Communications Inc., a Fairfax, Va., company that sells voice-over-Internet services. The two started chatting with Alexander Sulzberger, Denwa's local rep and a BusyInternet tenant. They discussed the possibility of preparing a system that would bill customers on the spot for both Internet use and phone calls. Mr. Dearman, relatively new to Africa, figured the technology is so cheap and simple that everybody should want it. "I don't know why it's so clandestine," he said.

"Because people get locked up for it," Mr. Sulzberger shot back.

Indeed, everybody knows what happened to Nanayaa T. Owusu-Prempeh, chief executive of Tin-IFA Ghana Ltd., an Internet-service provider across the road from BusyInternet. A couple of years back, Mrs. Owusu-Prempeh was making good money by facilitating the flow of incoming international voice-over-Internet calls into the local phone system, a practice known as call termination.

With 60 Ghana Telecom lines, business representatives estimate a call terminator could clear $15,000 a month. The thought of that lost revenue was apparently too much for the Rawlings government, and in 2000 a police SWAT team swept into Mrs. Owusu-Prempeh's offices and ripped out her satellite dish, computers, fax machine, tables and everything else. Her entire staff was jailed for three days, and, she says, it took about a year to get her equipment back.

For now, she says, Tin-IFA doesn't offer call-termination services. But she is ready to start up again should the new government allow it, and she suspects that many others are doing it on the sly. Ghanaian officials say they will decide in their own good time if, when and how to permit voice calls over the Internet. "We don't want to leap and then say we've either leaped too far or leaped far short of our target," says John S. Achuliwor, deputy minister of communications and technology. He stresses the government's concern about the impact Internet calls would have on existing phone services, such as Ghana Telecom.

Mr. Achuliwor also warns that violators could see their equipment seized. Mr. Davies isn't about to risk that, but others aren't so shy. At the end of the upstairs hall at BusyInternet is the local office of Rising Data Solutions, a Gaithersburg, Md., company with big plans for Ghana. Rising Data is negotiating a contract with a doctors' answering-service company that wants a low-price overseas center to handle calls from U.S. patients.

In the next few months, says Kwame M. Bonsu, vice president for operations, Rising Data will open a 100-employee operation where, 175,000 times a month, Ghanaian operators will pick up the phone and answer: "Dr. So-and-So's office. Can I help you?"

A 20-year International Business Machines veteran who has traded in his white button-down for the colorful African print shirt of his homeland, Mr. Bonsu is betting that the government won't dare raid such a large employer. "Let me put it this way: We don't think it's going to stop us from going ahead," he says.

Copyright WSJ updated May 22, 2002 Write to Michael M. Phillips at michael.phillips@wsj.com

Library: Entrepreneurship in Africa featuring eShopAfrica.com

Entrepreneurship in Africa: A Study of Successes

Entrepreneurship in Africa is a study of those entrepreneurs who have achieved success, wealth, and fame by organizing and directing a business undertaking in Africa. It is a story about successful entrepreneurs who have assumed risk in pursuit of profit, who have tried to conform to ethical business standards and who have tried to contribute to the economic development and improve the natural environment and the education, health, and welfare of their community and nation.

Media: AMEX: eShopAfrica.com made 'lead' company

AMEX, a USAID project designed to increase non-traditional exports from Africa, has made eShopAfrica.com a 'lead' company. It has chosen us an example of how ecommerce can be used to achieve their objectives and wants other businesses to follow our example. They are giving us valuable and timely support in building up our business fast.

Here are the criteria that AMEX used: 

• Wishes to be in the non-traditional export markets
• Wishes to use the most modern, but appropriate, technology
• Is a privately held market promotion and sales entity
• Is either already commercially linked, or wishes to be linked, with smaller firms of any type or small-scale producers of up-stream components. Is willing to 'pull' these smaller entities into a larger commercial arena
• Is willing to test concepts and develop new market opportunities
• Willing to be involved in the production and marketing of Ghanaian products with a high potential for increased revenues and significant multiplier effects
• Is willing to absorb new and innovative marketing and market intelligence systems. Growth potential in these aspects and also in revenues should be evident
• Has the potential for increased employment
• Has the potential to diversify its marketing of commodities, to include the United States as well as Europe and the West Africa sub-region
• Is sensitive to, and wishes to adopt, environmentally sound practices
•  There is the possibility of value addition to the enterprise's primary products.

Media: Computer and Technology News: Africa's Shopping Mall Launched

Computer and Technology News, Ghana, April 2001

Africa's Electronic shopping mall launched

An African art and craft ecommerce website has been launched in Accra. The website eShopAfrica.com is a business to business site with the objective of selling indigenous African manufactured products online to retailers and resellers around the world. The site, perhaps the most comprehensive and marketable website to come from Ghana, has an impressive collection of African products including cloths from West Africa, coffins from Ghana, beads from the sub region and masks and sculptures from all over Africa. The site also provides visitors the opportunity to personalise the products they want to and have them delivered.

The amazing story of eShopAfrica.com is that of four wonderful expatriate women: Cordelia Salter, technical member, Tine Knott, marketing member, Trish Graham, products member and Kawther El Obeid, business member coming together from different fields of endeavour and working from home to create what one IT professional at the launch remarked 'is the most practical example of ecommerce yet to come from Ghana'.

eShopAfrica.com uses an ecommerce software package designed for small businesses that want to sell on the Internet but can't afford large overheads, and this according to Salter-Nour is why anybody who wants to sell on the web should be able to do so. Through the technology of the Internet the eShopAfrica.com team hopes to give local artisans access to the global market. They say: 'It's time for ordinary Africans to start benefiting from connectivity.'

Even though the eShopAfrica.com team believe they will be bigger they say they intend to do things the African way and that they do not intend to destroy the way of production of the African people and that people will as El Obeid puts it 'not have to stop going to funerals because orders are so huge - we will remain big but small'

Copyright CTN Ghana ctn@ighmail.com

Launch Press Release Feb 01

eShopAfrica.com, a fair trade ecommerce website operating out of Ghana, West Africa is launching this week. eShopAfrica.com brings you top quality African arts and crafts made by traditional African artisans many of who currently live in povoery. The world has been told to buy more from Africa - we want to help them.

Launch Press Release February 2001

  eShopAfrica.com brings you top quality African manufactured goods in bulk. We are based in Ghana, West Africa and are using the Internet to create a larger global market for African products. The world has been told to buy more from Africa - we want to help them.
    We sell our goods in bulk - the more you buy the lower the price. As well as selling in bulk we offer pre-selected groups of items - Bumper buys - which attract a further discount. We offer a search service for unique and hard to find African items and can make product recommendations to help retailers find what their customers want. See the Gold Service page of our site for more details.
    We monitor the quality of all our products and agree quality guidelines with our suppliers. We enforce these guidelines rigorously to ensure our high standards. We do not disturb traditional supply and manufacturing lines and pay the fair market price for the quality we are buying. We put 10% of our profits back into the African community - see the Community page of our site for more details.
    As well as products, the shelves inside our shop are stocked with interesting facts about Africa and tips on how to use our products. Retailers can pass on these facts and tips to their customers to give the products added value.
    For our opening in February 2001 most of our stock is from Ghana. However, we are establishing links with artisans in other African countries and will be increasing our coverage soon. In the meantime, please visit our site and take a look at our products. The key to the success of any web business is publicity. Please help us by passing on our web address to anyone who may be interested. Thanks.

url   www.eShopAfrica.com

email  info@eShopAfrica.com