Peki
About three hours north-east of Accra, on the road to Ho. Where she is buried.
Ghana-Net.com · People of Ghana · Women of Ghana · Peki & Accra · 1919–2002
In 1943 a young woman fresh out of Achimota bought oranges, sugar and a dozen jars with a gift of ten shillings from her aunt, and started making marmalade in Accra. Her school classmates laughed at her. Within a few years she was supplying the army, and she went on to build one of the first food-processing companies in the Gold Coast, lead Ghana's industrialists, and help found a bank for poor women that now works across the world. When her children complained that she was teaching her competitors, she said that if they made better marmalade than she did, she deserved the competition. This is Auntie Ocloo.
Esther Afua Nkulenu was born on 18 April 1919 at Peki Dzake, an Ewe town in the hills of today's Volta Region. Her father, George Nkulenu, was a blacksmith; her mother, Georgina, a potter and farmer. Her grandmother sent her to a Presbyterian primary school, the mission tradition of Peki, one of the old centres of the Bremen Mission in the Ewe country.
She won a scholarship to Achimota, the elite school founded with Aggrey's help, and left with a Cambridge School Certificate and something Achimota taught girls that most schools did not: practical skills in cooking and food preparation.
In 1943, with a gift of about ten shillings from an aunt, she bought oranges, sugar and a dozen jars and began to make and sell orange marmalade in Accra. It was not the career expected of an Achimota graduate, and former classmates reportedly mocked her for selling in the street.
She soon had a contract to supply marmalade and orange juice to Achimota itself. Then came a bigger one, from the Royal West African Frontier Force, the colonial army, which was feeding soldiers during the Second World War. To meet it she needed capital, and she got a bank loan, at a time when banks rarely lent to African women at all.
From those contracts she built Nkulenu Industries, named after her father's family, one of the first food-processing businesses in the Gold Coast run by an African, and a woman. After the war she studied food preservation in England, from 1949 to 1951, and went back again in 1956 to develop recipes for commercial canning.
The company grew from marmalade into canned and bottled Ghanaian foods. Its palm-nut soup base, sold in tins, has been carried in the suitcases of Ghanaians abroad for decades. Nkulenu still makes marmalade today.
Taste it yourself: see our recipe for palm nut soup and the food and drink of Ghana.
After independence Nkrumah's government wanted Ghanaian-owned industry. Encouraged by him, Esther Ocloo became the first president, from 1959 to 1961, of the body that became the Federation of Ghana Industries, a woman heading an association of factory owners in 1959. She married Stephen Ocloo and raised four children while running the business.
Ocloo never forgot the bank loan that had let her grow. She knew that the market women and small producers of Ghana, the traders of Makola among them, could not get credit from ordinary banks: no land title, no collateral, no man to sign for them.
In 1976, after the first UN World Conference on Women, she co-founded Women's World Banking with the American Michaela Walsh and the Indian organiser Ela Bhatt, a network to give women small loans, business training and a voice in finance. She served as its first chair from 1979 to 1985. The network grew into one of the pioneers of what the world now calls microfinance.
Teaching the competition: she trained hundreds of women in food processing, packaging and business, including women who then competed with her own company. Her answer to her worried children: her aim was to help other women, and if they made better marmalade, she deserved the competition.
Esther Afua Ocloo died of pneumonia in Accra on 8 February 2002, aged 82. She was given a state funeral and buried at her home town, Peki Dzake.
About three hours north-east of Accra, on the road to Ho. Where she is buried.
And our Volta site, HoInGhana.com, with Amedzofe and Tafi Atome nearby.
The women she set out to help with credit.
Where she learned the skills, and won her first contract.
Esther Ocloo's story is often told as a fairy tale about ten shillings, and the ten shillings were real. But what made her extraordinary was what she did once she had succeeded: she used her position to open doors for women who had no aunt with ten shillings, no Achimota scholarship and no bank willing to lend. Long before microfinance was fashionable in Washington, a marmalade-maker from Peki was arguing that the poorest women were a good risk. Her factory made Ghanaian food; her bank helped make Ghanaian businesswomen. Both are still working.
Verified: 29 September 2026. Her birth at Peki Dzake on 18 April 1919, her parents, her Achimota scholarship, the marmalade business begun in 1943, the Achimota and Royal West African Frontier Force contracts, Nkulenu Industries, her studies in England (1949–51, 1956), the Federation of Ghana Industries (1959–61), Women's World Banking (founded 1976; first chair 1979–85), the 1990 Africa Prize for Leadership shared with Olusegun Obasanjo, her death on 8 February 2002, her state funeral and burial at Peki Dzake follow Wikipedia, the African Studies Centre Leiden and published biographies. The amount of her aunt's gift is usually given as ten shillings. Corrections welcome and will be published in full.