Ghana’s first shopping centre is the A&C Mall and this facility was established by Andrew Asamoah, a former director of the World Health Organisation (WHO).
The A&C Mall was opened in Accra in 2005 after Mr Asamoah took early retirement and decided to return home with his family to Ghana from Geneva, Switzerland in the early 2000s.
According to him, he bought the land where A&C Mall stands today, 10 years before he returned to Ghana.
Building Ghana’s first shopping mall was initially not on his bucket list of things to do. He started an Accra-based commercial property company called A&C Development, named after himself and his wife, Cecilia.
“When I was growing up, my family always rented property, and therefore the wish for owning property became ingrained at a very young age,” said Mr Asamoah.
It was only when he realised a significant gap in the property market: no malls had been built yet in Ghana, that he decided to chart such path.
With his business plan adapted and some start-up capital taken from his own savings and investments, he approached the banks. “I thought that it would be an easy sell,” he says. “It was not; as this would be the first mall in Ghana, the banks were sceptical.”
The banks warned that the project might not succeed because Ghana’s thriving traditional marketplace culture would not tolerate a mall.
Asamoah made the painful decision to sell all his homes in Geneva, London, and New York in order to raise the money for the first stage of A&C Mall on his own because he knew he would need to obtain funding elsewhere.
Phase one planning and construction got under way, but the business still had to find an anchor tenant. As Asamoah approached the larger neighborhood supermarkets, he was once again treated with skepticism. Next came a vacation to South Africa.
“I went to meet with South African retailer SPAR. They directed me to their Zimbabwe office, which at the time was responsible for development and expansion in West Africa,” he said.
Asamoah was informed that in order to manage the supermarket, he would have to collaborate with SPAR, which operates on a franchising model. He declined because he had not planned on having retail as a second job.
When word of the meetings outside of Ghana’s borders reached home, local store MaxMart contacted A&C Development as a potential anchor tenant.
“They took 40% of the available space from phase one. Once their contract was in place, it took us less than six months to get to 100% occupancy,” Asamoah recalls.
Due to the income from lease agreements, he was able to fund the completion of phase one and A&C Mall, which was opened officially in 2005 by then President John Agyekum Kufuor.
A&C Mall was finally finished ten years later. A&C Development used the money from the mall and its other properties in Ghana in the years that followed to finish the second and third phases, which included a gas station, a fitness center, and Business Center 1.
The International Finance Corporation contributed US$4.4 million in 2012 to the development of Business Center II. With this assistance, the company renovated the original mall and created a playground for kids. When it was finished, the University of Lancaster occupied two floors, and two banks and other businesses rented space on the ground floor.
Due to competition from the likes of Accra Mall, and the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, Mr Asamoah says the business is “looking at how we can drop our cost per square metre to entice businesses to take up the vacant space we currently have.”
Meanwhile, the company is opening its latest development to the public in the coming months. A&C Corner, a 9,000m2 centre 1km away from A&C Mall is focused on the provision of building materials and décor.
“We felt that what Ghana needed was something akin to Home Depot in the US, or Builders’ Warehouse in South Africa,” says Asamoah. “All the space has been taken up and we will have the official opening in June.”
Next on the cards is a development which will be five to six times the size of the original A&C Mall called the A&C Village. It will span over 68,000m2 of land 5km north of the current properties.
“East Legon has no more space and people are moving into estates to the north. A&C Village will be in the heart of this new community,” says Asamoah.
Source: The Independent Ghana