Marketing practices and poverty reduction: a study of women in pito brewing at Ejura

Abstract

Traditionally, married women in rural Ghana are customarily required to give helping hand to their husbands in farms. The proceeds however belong to the men who have control over the farm's income. Men in Northern rural Ghana do not consider the development of their household a priority. Women are, however, a major force behind the upkeep of the household. This mounts undue financial pressure on the women who have less or no financial strength to provide the need of the household. They use several means to provide clothing, health care, and education to the household. These financial challenges often compel women and sometimes their female children to migrate to urban centers to seek greener pastures. This exposes them to several vices that ruin their lives. These people then become liabilities to their communities. To free themselves from such predicaments and also to contribute to meet domestic expenditure requirements, a good number of women at Ejura in the Ashanti Region, have engaged in income generating activities such as Pito brewing, a source of income to be able. to pay children school fees, buy cloth and everyday household provisions for the family. Even though some have difficulty in raising the seed capital, most of them have achieved a lot economically; educating their wards to higher level of educational ladder as well as building houses. The focus of this study has been to unravel the marketing practices these pito brewers are employing and the extent their business has empowered them economically. The findings have shown that marketing practices such as product development, marketing concept, pricing, advertising, public relation, merchandizing, consumer research, positioning, were those employ by these pito brewers in managing their business and that has positively impacted on their firms and performance. Even though the enterprise is seen to be lucrative, most brewers find it difficult to raise seed capital. In the light of this, the study made the following recommendation towards the empowerment of women: Government with MASLOC initiative can come to the aid of these women, these will encourage other women to enter the pito market, Pito as a beer, is known to have a short shelf - life as stated in Najah (2005), research can be done on increasing its shelf-life and finally, funds should be sourced for similar work to be done for the entire Nation