African Engineers: Solomon Adjololo
Kumasi, Ghana’s second metropolis, boasts what is claimed to be the premier market in West Africa at Kejetia. The most productive woman trader in each individual main commodity is designated the queen of that section of the market. Hence one particular can obtain a ‘shoe queen’ or a ‘soap queen.’ If the lots of engineering business owners of Kumasi have been to adopt the exact observe, Solomon Adjorlolo would without doubt be elected king of that area.
Solomon Adjorlolo was a technician engineer at the physics section of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technological know-how (KNUST), Kumasi, but his ambition was to begin his very own small business. He began in 1971 by making basic physics devices to provide to secondary colleges. Aided by Dr Frank Lukey, an English physics lecturer, Solomon started off his small business in Dr Lukey’s garage on the KNUST campus. As the business enterprise expanded and a number of basic woodworking machines ended up acquired Solomon made a decision to obtain a workshop at Anloga, a suburb of Kumasi with a huge neighborhood of carpenters and wherever he experienced spouse and children connections.
Wood was not the only content utilized in Solomon’s early do the job but it featured in most of his solutions. He diversified into manufacturing far more wooden products and solutions like main school training aids, drawing boards and tee squares. At initially, the prospects shopping for these goods were non-public educational facilities run by the church buildings which paid their expenditures instantly, but to further broaden the business Solomon was compelled to look for orders from state faculties. Advised to collect payment from the Ministry of Training, the revenue both came quite late or not at all. He made the decision that the company could not go on like that and he must examine new marketplaces.
It was then that Solomon contacted the Engineering Consultancy Centre (TCC) of the university. The TCC was demonstrating metal machining and welded steel plant design and providing instruction and entry to machine instruments, so Solomon made the decision to flip to metallic manufacturing. Via this programme, in 1979, he was equipped with device tools: lathes, a milling machine, welding and sawing equipment. Solomon made a decision to formally sign up his organization and modified its identify to SIS Engineering Ltd.
Surrounded by hundreds of carpentry workshops, the new firm was from time to time requested to undertake repairs on imported bench saws, planers and woodturning lathes. Solomon observed that only a number of of the greater workshops could manage these imported equipment and there was a big marketplace on his doorstep for locally produced machines offered at economical price ranges. He began generating bench saws and woodturning lathes and observed that developing machines was a great deal extra successful than any of his past ventures.
Soon after a couple of several years virtually each workshop in Carpenters’ Row, Anloga, experienced an SIS bench noticed and a number of workshops ended up working with four or additional SIS woodturning lathes generating countless numbers of furnishings legs and the well-known double-ended pestle termed an ‘ata’ (twin). Not only in Kumasi but during the region, SIS machines were being getting a name for sturdiness and productive just after-profits assistance. In addition to lessen price tag, being able to source spare sections and repairs at quick notice proved a main gain in level of competition with imported devices.
By the mid 1980s, SIS was creating a lot a lot more than woodworking machines. The write-up-harvest and meals processing field was a huge potential sector for economical regionally-manufactured machines. SIS manufactured a vary of equipment for milling corn, processing cassava and extracting palm oil and shea butter. As the perform progressed the machines grew larger to attain an industrial scale, with multi-tonne-a-working day feed mills for huge poultry farms, vegetable oil mills and steam distillation vegetation producing fragrance from citronella and lemon grass.
Though Solomon was now producing plant for really significant enterprises he hardly ever misplaced his problem for helping the little-scale informal sector industries. Encouraging standard women’s teams manufacturing standard foodstuffs was normally 1 of his priorities. For case in point, the common food stuff product or service ‘gari’ was produced from cassava by groups of women of all ages using simple hand equipment and charcoal stoves. When he was requested to deliver a mechanical plant for a male entrepreneur he was worried that the ladies may be driven out of business. He consulted the TCC, and doing work with the National Council on Ladies and Enhancement (NCWD), assist businesses were alerted to the hazard and a lot of of the women’s groups were equipped with the new technologies.
By the late 1980s, a lot of of the orders for food processing devices came immediately to SIS Engineering from advancement organizations advertising rural and women’s industries. No lengthier needing the TCC as a go-between Solomon was serving to the TCC far more than the TCC was encouraging SIS. He was associated in the improvement of new machines, teaching apprentices and contributing to instructing workshops, seminars and small classes held at the university. Nonetheless, remaining a primary member of the TCC Customers Affiliation, Solomon Adjorlolo generally preserved that without the suggestions of the TCC to improve to metal manufacturing, and the source of machine equipment on straightforward-payment phrases, none of his success would have been doable.
