Hey guys, so back on my networking and social connections new year resolution, I went for a meetup this weekend. One of the biggest I’ve been to and probably will go to this year!
Tamale Barcamp
The name is Tamale Barcamp because Barcamp is actually the general name for the nationwide meetup all over Ghana. We have about 8 Barcamps all over Ghana: One in Bolga, Koforidua, Accra, Ho, Kumasi, Takoradi, Sunyani and Tamale.
Out of all of them, Tamale Barcamp happened first this year yesterday on 29th July between 9am-3pm.
I’ve been to a couple of meetups for different events this year, but the Barcamp stood out because the registration/sign up process was a lot more digital.
For most of the ones I’ve been to this year, you sign up by adding your name to a list on a WhatsApp page. But with Barcamp, google forms were sent out to capture the number of interested participants first, and the event itself was added on EventBrite, an unpopular but useful event-tracking application. The Barcamp participants were to book their tickets on EventBrite for free. I liked that one person could book more than one ticket. That way, you could register for friends who were having problems with accessing EventBrite.
Funny thing is I didn’t even register by the deadline and I’ve been aware of it for over a month! I kept postponing registering something that would take me literally less than a minute to sign up for. And when I eventually decided to do it 2 days ago on Friday morning, I saw that the tickets were sold out! Boy!
That didn’t stop me from attending though. On Saturday morning, I linked up with my boy 
I have to admit, this might not have been the fanciest meetup I’ve been to, but it was definitely fun! I met a lot of interesting people. And when I say met, I mean both simply seeing and in some cases, seeing and talking to.
My favorite part of the Barcamp was the one-on-one conversations with mentors session.
They seated mentors randomly at the front, shared pictures explaining their specialities on their twitter page, and allocated a period of 7 minutes for us to select and have one-on-one chats with our mentors.
I had my eyes on two people: Prof Kosi Sabaa- an Associate Professor at the University I work at right now and Miss Anaab Milicent- a lady that is in a significantly powerful position in my region. I wanted to talk to the professor for some advice regarding my career, and the Lady to build a connection with her so she’ll notice and remember me in case there’s ever any opportunity she needs a young mind in my locality for. Unfortunately, I was only able to speak to one of them - the associate professor.
What was even more disappointing is the fact that after stalking my professor mentor for close to 30 minutes, I eventually didn’t get up to the 7 minutes designated for each person with the professor. But I can’t blame anyone about that part because it was failure on my part to show up on time. I utilized the few minutes I got with him though, and got his number and this picture.
The professor is the man with the book (obviously). Who is the other guy then? The other guy is Ato Ulzen, the CEO and Founder of GhanaThink. GhanaThink is like the foundation that hosts not just Barcamps, but mini meetups such as connect events like Tamale Connect.
It was time to dig into the food at this point and boy was it stressful to get it!
We had to form 4 lines of queue all Kindergaten style to take the food. You would think they’d serve us the food inside as we were seated, and you wouldn’t be wrong to think that. I actually questioned why they didn’t do that. You see though, the problem was that not everyone seated inside had a coupon to take the snacks. Even I didn’t have a coupon because remember I didn’t get to register for the event.
Oh yeah and did I mention that they later made us take a driving IQ test for Malta Guinness? The standard was that the people that scored 10/10 would get a malt. I sent it to Nhaji after I got my first question wrong. I’ll let her tell you her scores if she’s confident enough about it.😂
After the breakfast snack, there were a couple of other sessions including a talk from Red Clay’s very own Ibrahim Mahama. I’ve seen, read and heard a lot about this man, so believe me when I say I was excited to finally get to meet him in person today. He said a lot, and accidentally blurted the fact that he was getting married today! Yes, Today! The wedding is in procession as you’re reading this post.
We also had breakout sessions where the camp was divided into about 4 sub-camps to focus on discussions on Financial Literacy, Volunteering, STEM, and Clean Air. I wanted to be a part of all of the 4 camps, but the problem was that the 4 camps were all doing their discussions separately at the same time. So unless I could be in 4 different places at once, yeah no freaking way.
If you’re curious, I ended up choosing to join the financial literacy camp, because you know me and money. Haha.
In the financial literacy camp, we were given a talk by 2 Financial Literacy “Experts”. The presentation by the first almost bored me to death. The second though, his presentation was much better. But what surprised me was how two “experts” could give an entire 30+ minutes talk on financial literacy and not mention cryptocurrency even once. When the floor was opened for Q&A, I almost added my shock as a contribution, but luckily enough, someone asked “what do you think the future of money is?”. This forced the speakers to have to do a lazy touch on what digital currency crypto and all that stuff. I still raised my point later though, and talked about how crypto is not talked about as much as it should be around here.
After the sub-camp leaders’ presentations were over, they chose 1 member each from each sub-camp to do a presentation of what they learnt from that sub-camp. Can’t say the Financial Literacy rep did a mind-blowing job, but she definitely wasn’t the worst.
After all was said and done, we had lunch around 3:30pm and closed after.
Seriously, this has to be the most exciting meetup I’ve attended this year, and I’m looking forward to attending more Barcamps and seminars this year!
I wrote this post a week ago and have been stalling posting for a long time. I’m leaving the tense unchanged because if I try to update it, I’m going to be removing pieces of information I consider relevant to the experience.
All Images here except for the fliers with Mentors are mine.