01
Management, medicine and music
Vako's father founded Nyaho Medical Centre in Ghana, and she grew up expecting to work in it. After an economics degree in the US she came home and worked through billing, client services and business development, helped set up its first IT department, and took an Executive MBA while working. The arts ran alongside all of it: choirs, the drama club, visual arts, writing songs. She calls it her three Ms: management, medicine and music. She still sits on the board of the family business.
02
From a church camp to a staged production
In 2012 a friend running a church camp for teenagers wanted to take them through drama. Vako added music and they made their first musical. By 2017 she had stepped back from full-time work in the family business, found a consultant who knew the arts industry in Ghana, put her stories together and staged a first production.
03
A home for the performing arts
While studying in the US, Vako went to shows at the Kennedy Center and volunteered there. Ghana has venues, but very few. She believes the country has a comparative advantage in the performing arts, because music and dance run through its traditions, yet many arts graduates end up in accounting because the industry has not been built. The long-term plan for The Indigen Group is a centre and an academy for the performing arts.
04
Where Ayjunt came from
Covid closed live shows, and in 2020 the group staged a production outdoors and streamed it. A faith-based accelerator in South Africa then pushed her to add technology to the business. The gap she saw: performers get most of their work at events, and clients find them by word of mouth. What if every performer were in one place, and a client could look and book? A friend suggested Bubble. Vako decided the learning curve was not for her and looked for a developer, which is how she met Onekode. She learned that what she was describing is called a marketplace, and that platforms like it exist in Europe and America but not in Ghana.
05
Adapt it, do not copy it
Vako studied the platforms that already exist rather than reinvent them, then ran a working group of people in the industry to find out what would hold in her own market, including whether performers would pay monthly or want a different arrangement. Ayjunt starts in Ghana and is positioned for the rest of Africa. Matching performers to clients with AI is on her mind, but only once enough people are on both sides for the data to mean something.
06
Making the arts a real business
Performers often have to chase clients for payment after a show. Ayjunt sets dates, times and payment in advance. A performer signs up, uploads videos and a photo, sets a price and availability, and accepts or declines each booking. Vako's first show brought in about a quarter of the revenue she had planned for, and her advice is to underestimate revenue and overestimate costs. The Indigen Group is likely to become a non-profit, with Ayjunt as its for-profit arm.
07
What she tells other founders
Know why you are doing it, because nobody else will get you up in the morning. Be ready to change direction to find a way of earning that works, then come back to what you set out to do. Be honest about what you do not know: technology only helps an industry when it is joined to knowledge of that industry. And build the seriousness that makes people want to listen to you.
“You have to know your why as an entrepreneur.”
