Stars From All Nations (SFAN), Ghana’s leading edtech company unlocking the potential of Africa’s young geniuses, partnered with Adjaye Associates, the award-winning architecture and design firm led by Sir David Adjaye with studios in Accra, London, and New York, to host a free coaching session for creative entrepreneurs on June 23 at the firm’s Accra studio.
The session is the latest in SFAN’s ReadyforWork live coaching series, which has run since 2018 to connect rising professionals and entrepreneurs with practical guidance and industry access. In March, SFAN partnered with Google’s Accra AI Community Center for a ReadyforWork AI Careers session that drew more than 70 participants.
This installment was built specifically for select graduates of SFAN’s ReadyforWork Creative Entrepreneurship Program Acceleration. It was designed to open market access pipelines for creatives already building businesses.
Adjaye Associates CEO Kofi Bio welcomed attendees to the studio. “When we designed the space, we wanted it to be more than just an office. We wanted it to be a place where ideas are exchanged, creativity is nurtured, and where people from different backgrounds and disciplines can come together to learn and collaborate. That’s fundamentally what the studio stands for,” he said.
He continued: “We believe that across the continent, there’s an incredible generation of entrepreneurs, makers, designers, film directors, innovators springing up. And the future of our continent will not be shaped just by institutions. We believe that it’ll be shaped by these operators, individuals with ideas, courage, and determination to create something really, really meaningful.”
A keynote panel followed, moderated by SFAN Founder and President Tom-Chris Emewulu and featuring four voices from the studio.
Stephanie Bart-Mensah, Adjaye Associates’ Interior Design Lead, laid out her blueprint for a purposeful career: building work that makes the world want to connect with your craft on a deeper level. Being part of something bigger than yourself, she said, opens up problems you never thought you could solve.
Susan Akpebu, the firm’s Human Resource Manager, addressed the people and culture side of running a business. Structure protects business owners from self-sabotage, she said, and the people a company hires have to live its values, not just recite them.
Architect Etonam Adzoa Amegbe offered a mental model for making your work speak for you when you’re not in the room. The only sustainable way to stand out, she argued, is to make people feel something different.
Finance Manager Eileen Ninson emphasized financial discipline with the line worth remembering: “Your financial future is being decided by the foundations you lay today.” She pushed the room to start thinking like business owners. Not just creatives.
Kwabena Opoku Osei, Coretta Hanson, and Phelim Owusu led a studio tour afterward, followed by the small-group coaching with four industry figures: Tracy Kyei of Samsung West Africa, artist and CEO Desmond Blackmore (D-Black), Phil Philips of the Barbados High Commission in Ghana, and Adjaye Associates’ Ann Abbam Adjaye.
The timing for this go-to-market coaching session wasn’t incidental. Ghana’s UNESCO inscriptions, Kente in 2024 and Highlife in 2025, are a formal recognition of the cultural capital the country has been building for generations. They give the country a licensing and IP framework and institutional backing for tourism and global storytelling. What they don’t give is infrastructure: enforceable contracts for Kente weavers, royalty collection for Highlife musicians, distribution deals for Ghanaian film. Those still have to be built, by institutions, policy, and the creatives themselves.
The Creative Hustle, SFAN’s research on Ghana’s creative economy, lays out the scale of both the opportunity and the gap.
Fashion alone contributed $2.42 billion to GDP in 2025 and supported 125,000 livelihoods, most of them informal. Sub-Saharan Africa’s recorded music revenue reached $120 million in 2025, its second straight year of double-digit growth. The African Continental Free Trade Area is gradually opening a market of 1.3 billion people.
Sessions like the ReadyforWork go-to-market coaching exist to turn that cultural capital into commercial infrastructure.
Kofi Bio put it simply in closing: “Our own journey on the continent as Adjaye Associates is proof that design can be a powerful tool for economic growth. Design creates opportunities. It helps businesses tell their stories, reach new markets, solve problems, build value, but most importantly it helps bring value to reality. And simply, that is why Adjaye Associates studio exists. We want this space to be a place where young creatives can showcase their work, connect with others, find new opportunities, collaborate across industries; a place where talent is visible, and conversations become partnerships, and where creativity becomes enterprise.”
Creatives who want in on the next ReadyforWork session can apply at https://readyforwork.africa/coaching/live-session or follow SFAN for upcoming dates.
