Elliot Dadey, CEO of KGL Foundation, has a message for young Ghanaians: stop copying the outside world and start trusting your own ideas. He says Ghana already has more creative talent than people realize.
Speaking at an IYF Mentoring Session on creativity and initiative, Dadey said young Africans are often taught to see creativity as copying — looking at successful people abroad and thinking progress means doing what they did. He disagrees.
To prove his point, he used something almost every Ghanaian home has owned: the checkered bag known as “Ghana Must Go.” In 2007, Louis Vuitton put its own luxury version on the runway, selling for around US$600.
“The object did not suddenly become creative when it arrived in Paris,” he said. “What changed was who was looking at it.”
He urged young people to pay as much attention to Kumasi, Tamale, Takoradi, and Accra as they do to London, New York, and Dubai. He mentioned teenage girls in Nima who taught themselves to code and now work with organisations in Germany, and designers in Wa whose work with local weavers now attracts international buyers to Accra. “Ghana does not have a shortage of creativity,” he said. “Sometimes what we need is simply a fresh pair of eyes.”
Dadey was direct about the gap between having an idea and actually doing something with it. Everyone has ideas, he said — what matters is action. His advice: if you want to plan a festival, first organise something for 40 people. If you want to start an NGO, help ten people properly before you design a logo or write a long strategic plan.
On confidence, he pointed to Burna Boy’s public pushback over his billing at Coachella in 2019. The lesson, he said, isn’t about the personality — it’s about believing in the value of your work before anyone else validates it. Boldness works best when backed by real skill.
He also acknowledged that not everyone starts from the same place, and said motivation alone doesn’t change that. What it does, he said, is sharpen the question: given what I have right now, what can I actually do?
Participants left with a 7-day challenge: Notice a problem. Write down ten possible solutions. Pick one. Build the smallest working version. Show it to five people. Ask what’s not working. Fix it.
He ended by saying Ghana doesn’t need another generation copying the past — it needs “a generation of young people brave enough to build it without waiting for permission.”
