The Emi-Beth Aku Quantson Story : Founder, Kawa Moka Coffee Company — Ghana

A Random Beginning

In her final year at Ashesi University, then based in Accra, Emi-Beth Aku Quantson needed a project for her entrepreneurship thesis. There was a gazebo in a garden on campus, and she decided to turn it into a coffee shop. She called it The Lounge. There was no filter coffee machine to be found anywhere nearby, so in the beginning she served Nescafé instant coffee like everyone else. On a good day, the shop sold about one cup of coffee, and half of those sales were to family and friends. She has since described the whole thing as very random. It did not feel, at the time, like the beginning of anything significant.

**The Detour Through Accounting**

After graduating with honours in Business Administration, Emi-Beth kept The Lounge running while she pursued her ACCA qualification and worked as a tax consultant and transfer pricing specialist at PwC, first in Ghana and then in Kenya. It was a conventional, high-achieving corporate path. But two things happened during those years that redirected her. The first was attending the Specialty Coffee Association's Re:co and Expo events in Seattle in 2013, where she decided that coffee people were some of the most interesting people on the planet and that this was a world she wanted to be part of. The second was her time in Kenya, where she watched East Africa's coffee industry mature into a serious, globally respected specialty sector. She began to sense that West Africa's moment in coffee was close, and that Ghana, historically known almost entirely for cocoa, had its own coffee story waiting to be told.

**Founding Kawa Moka**

She returned home and founded Kawa Moka in 2015, opening a café inside Accra's Impact Hub, later also operating out of the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology. The name was chosen deliberately: Kawa is the Arabic root of the word coffee, sometimes translated as "the wine of the bean," while Moka references the historic seaport city long tied to the global coffee trade. Together the name gestures at both coffee's African origins and its long global journey. That same year, the young company won the 2015 Ghana StartUp Cup at the National StartUp Festival, earning a place in the wider African StartUp Cup challenge and an early signal that the idea had legs beyond a campus project.

From the outset, Emi-Beth framed Kawa Moka as a social enterprise rather than a conventional café business. Her stated mission combined three elements she felt were deeply connected: coffee, chocolate, and women. She built a small team of women baristas and staff, many of them from backgrounds excluded from Accra's mainstream economy, and structured the business to create employment and mentorship alongside its commercial goals.

**From Café to Roastery**

The café ran successfully for nearly five years. In late 2019, Kawa Moka took its most significant step, launching its own roastery and moving into coffee producing and packaging rather than simply serving drinks. This shift took the business upstream, into direct relationships with farmers.

Kawa Moka now sources fine Robusta coffee from rural growers in Leklebi, a town in Ghana's Volta Region, working with roughly twenty small farms in the area. Many of the farmers she partners with are women, and Emi-Beth has spoken about watching them sing as they harvest, with lyrics about coffee paying their children's school fees. She has been candid that improving quality and connecting these farmers to global buyers at fair prices was never separate from the business plan; it was the plan. In 2022, she spoke at the SCA's Re:co event on the underappreciated potential of specialty Robusta, positioning Ghanaian Robusta as an origin capable of competing on quality rather than being treated as a lesser bean.

**Nothing Goes to Waste**

True to the social enterprise model, Kawa Moka has built a circular approach around its own production waste. Spent coffee grounds are repurposed into a skincare line that includes handmade cappuccino soap, a coffee detox scrub, coffee-infused body oil, and coffee body butter. The roastery itself runs on solar power, an operational choice that reflects the same resourcefulness Emi-Beth showed when she started with an empty gazebo and no coffee machine.

**Recognition and Growth**

The business has since raised more than 200,000 dollars in combined debt and equity investment, created over 250 jobs through farmer partnerships and direct employment, and built what is now described as Accra's largest roastery, supplying major supermarkets and cafes both within Ghana and internationally. In 2019, President Nana Akufo-Addo publicly recognized Emi-Beth for her contribution to job creation and industry building through Kawa Moka, and she went on to win Ghana's Presidential Pitch competition.

Her standing in the wider specialty coffee world has grown alongside the business. She was selected as an SCA LEAD Scholar for the 2019–2020 cohort, joining a small international group of coffee entrepreneurs given a two-year runway of industry access, mentorship, and career development support. She later became a board member of the Specialty Coffee Association itself, an alumna of Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses, and a representative of Orange Corners Ghana, through which she pitched Kawa Moka's growth plans to international partners and funders at Startup Night Africa in the Netherlands.

**The Throughline**

What connects the gazebo café to the solar-powered roastery is a consistent instinct: build the value chain at home rather than exporting the raw material and importing the finished product back. Emi-Beth has built Kawa Moka as proof that Ghanaian coffee, and the women who grow it, deserve to sit at the center of that value chain rather than at its margins. Nearly two decades after a thesis project that sold one cup of instant coffee a day, that proof is now sitting on supermarket shelves.

---

Africa One Brand: Spotlighting the founders building Africa's agribusiness and trade future. Follow the series and connect with the broader Africa One Brand community at linkedin.com/company/africa-one-brand.