Patricia Poku-Diaby

Patricia Poku-Diaby is a Ghanaian cocoa entrepreneur and businesswoman, the founder and chief executive of Plot Enterprise Ghana Limited, and widely regarded as one of the most significant figures in the African cocoa processing industry. Built on a foundation of inherited commercial instinct and bold entrepreneurial judgement, her company processes tens of thousands of metric tons of cocoa annually and has established her as a pioneer of local value-addition in a sector long dominated by multinational corporations headquartered far from the farms that produce the world's chocolate.

Background and family heritage

Poku-Diaby is one of eighteen children of the late Francis Kojo Poku, a Ghanaian entrepreneur whose ventures spanned pharmaceuticals, timber and transportation and who instilled in his large family a practical understanding of how to build and sustain businesses across different sectors. She gained her initial commercial experience in her father's transport and trading operations, learning the logistical and financial fundamentals of running enterprises at scale before striking out on her own. That apprenticeship in the family business gave her the confidence and the operational grounding that her later, far more ambitious venture would require.

Founding Plot Enterprise

In 2010, Poku-Diaby founded the Plot Enterprise Group, establishing her first operations in Côte d'Ivoire, the world's largest cocoa producer, before expanding into Ghana. The decision to build a cocoa grinding and processing facility placed her in direct competition with the multinationals that had historically captured the value-addition stages of cocoa production while African farmers and governments captured only the lower-margin commodity export. Her processing plant transforms 32,000 metric tons of cocoa annually, employs more than 600 people and generates revenues exceeding fifty million US dollars. She has been recognised as the only African woman to have built a large-scale cocoa processing facility, a distinction that reflects both the rarity of her achievement and the structural barriers she overcame to accomplish it. Afreximbank has backed her expansion as she pursues further moves up the cocoa value chain.

Wealth and recognition

In 2015, Poku-Diaby was listed as the eighth wealthiest person in Ghana and the wealthiest woman in the country, with a reported net worth of 720 million US dollars. Her recognition has extended to international business forums and regional leadership events where she has spoken about the importance of African-owned processing capacity and the systemic changes needed to ensure that cocoa-producing countries retain more of the value their farmers create.

Business Legacy

Patricia Poku-Diaby's career represents one of the most consequential acts of entrepreneurial ambition in contemporary Ghanaian business. By building local processing capacity in an industry where value had long flowed to foreign corporations, she has made a practical argument for African economic sovereignty that the scale of her enterprise makes impossible to dismiss.