My Mother’s Market Table Was a Business School

She used to wake up at 4:00 a.m. every day.

No alarms. No caffeine. No office drama.

Just instinct and discipline.

Her name was Akosua.

She wasn’t called an entrepreneur.

She was called “market woman.”

But what if we’ve misunderstood her all along? For decades, women like her have been the economic backbone of Ghana. They sell everything from pepper to panties, water to wedding gowns, bread to building blocks. And they do it with no seed capital, no spreadsheets, and no government recognition.

Just grit.

Yet their daughters — the very women who inherited their resilience — have been taught to escape the market, not embrace it. Go to school. Get a job. Avoid your mother’s hustle. That was the mantra.

And so many did.

They graduated with honors, got jobs in banks, ministries, NGOs. They swapped the market table for the office desk. And many are now burnt out, broke, and wondering how their mothers made more money with less education.

A Culture That Glorifies Escape, Not Evolution

In Ghanaian society, the informal economy has long been seen as a second-class hustle. It’s where you land when “real plans” fail. But that perspective is not only outdated — it’s harmful. The informal economy contributes more than 40% of Ghana’s GDP. Women dominate it.

Yet they’re invisible in most economic conversations. They are called “unbanked,” “unregistered,” “unstructured.” But they are also unmatched in resilience, creativity, and survival instincts.

So what happens when we reframe the story?

What happens when we tell young women that their mother’s market table wasn’t failure — it was a business school? That pricing tomatoes by instinct is supply-and-demand. That negotiating with a difficult customer is CRM. That rotating susu contributions is a microfinance model.

And that legacy isn’t always found in law firms or multinationals — sometimes it lives in the smell of fried fish, the hum of sewing machines, and the tap of Momo transactions.

A New Generation Reclaiming Old Wisdom

Something is shifting. A wave of Ghanaian women are ditching formal work that drains them — and returning to the “hustles” they once ran away from. But this time, they’re scaling them. They’ve learned to brand what their mothers sold unlabelled.

They take orders through WhatsApp instead of notebooks.

They dispatch with Bolt, advertise with Canva, track payments with mobile apps, and register with the GRA. These are not your typical market women. They are modern entrepreneurs with ancestral blueprints. They don’t wear suits — but they move money.

They don’t beg for capital — they flip their own.

They don’t call it “resignation.”

They call it freedom.

Let’s Be Honest: Some Degrees Don’t Pay What Plantain Does

This is not to shame the formal sector. Many women thrive there.

But too many are quietly suffering — underpaid, overqualified, emotionally depleted — while trying to keep up an image of professional success that no longer serves them.

So the question is simple: If your mother made more money with a tabletop than you make with a desktop…

What’s stopping you from returning home to build it better?

A New Movement: My Mother’s Business Is My Inheritance

It’s time to stop seeing market trade as backward. It’s time to stop treating women in the informal sector as invisible. It’s time for daughters to reclaim their mothers’ wisdom — and remix it with technology, branding, and vision. It’s time to build platforms, not just placards.

Susu groups into cooperatives.

Salons into academies.

Tabletops into enterprises.

Because truthfully, the hustle never died. It just evolved. And in the new Ghana rising, the women who will win are not the ones who chased borrowed dreams— but those who inherited a blueprint, respected it, and dared to scale it. The informal economy is not a last resort.

For many Ghanaian women, it is the first act of ownership.

And if we’re smart, we’ll stop looking down on it —

and start building from it.