ADENTAN – it means the place of the warriors, where they met to plan their war strategies against other tribes.

Today the warriors have been replaced by a group of people planning something very different – the future for 140,000 people.

The sun beats down on the red dirt road lined with shops of varying sizes. Some are wooden, but most are made out of what looks like cut-down metal shipping containers. Apparently there’s a flourishing industry in making made-to-measure metal boxes like this for Ghana’s shopkeepers.

Some of these shops are fancier than others. Some have porches, some windows, a few boast neon signs.

What most of them have in common is a homage to the Almighty. God Is King hair salon seems a bizarre name for a business but it’s soon apparent that it’s nothing out of the unusual in this so religious country.

There’s God First Hair Cut; By His Grace Enterprise; Hand of God Motors, and Give Up Only in the Grave taxis.

There’s something else the shops have in common – the waiting.

In each of these roadside units sits a man or woman or child, waiting for the next customer. It’s often a long wait.

For the most part, these shops offer a subsidence living but little more. It’s an enterprise culture built on necessity and sometimes desperation.

But enterprise it is, and the team from Worcester are here to try to help develop it.

Sticking out like a sore thumb, our white faces bring stares and a few ‘hey, white man’ calls as we wander the streets of Adentan (it’s pronounced Adenta, a silent final N) trying to gauge what we have got ourselves into and how we can put our experiences from back home in England to good use in this country. There are six of us.

Councillor Marc Bayliss, cabinet member responsible for economic development, is the team leader.

His shadow, Councillor Pat Agar, and town planner Jim Blackwell are trying to help the Adentan Municipal Assembly draw up a master plan for the future of their fast growing area.

In a handful of years the area has grown from 90,000 to an estimated 140,000. The assembly need a short, medium and long-term plan for how to develop roads, hospitals, schools, refuse, industry, markets, shops, houses.

Angela Fitch, from the Federation of Small Business, and Nigel Walton, from the University of Worcester’s business school, are there to help set up a federation and to give training in small business growth.

Me? I’m trying to help the assembly develop a newspaper they launched last year as part of a strategy to try to help businesses grow.

It’s called the Adentan News and it’s the first local newspaper in Ghana, but the previous manager has left and the paper is not achieving its targets.

It’s not a bad time to start a newspaper. Ghana’s economy is one of the fastest growing in the world at the moment, and computers are not widespread, so lifestyles still suit newspapers.

For five days the six of us sweat it out in a hot, humid climate, going through our repertoire of what we know and how it might be useful for them in the future.

We are driven to the assembly’s non-air conditioned offices, where power breaks down intermittently and water comes and goes.

Sweat and advice pour out of me in equally measure – by the bucket load. By the end of the week I am drained. It’s been a hard week, but an enormously fulfilling one.

As our time to depart nears we reflect on where we are. Adentan has the first small business federation in Ghana. The first local newspaper in Africa has been given a cash boost to keep going. The assembly is creating Ghana’s first town master plan.

I reflect on something striking about Ghana – they recycle nearly everything. Not out of Western, middle class desire to be ‘green’, but because they have to.

Take glass bottles. There’s a manufacturing industry in Ghana based around discarded bottles.

Crushed into glass dust, dyed, heated in ovens, cooled and then hand painted, the bottles become beads for bracelets, necklaces, earrings, and are sold for a few pounds to tourists.

Is that what Ghana has done to us six? Found us, extracted what knowledge we have, reworked it, and put it to good use.

I hope so. These happy, patient, generous, friendly, hard-working and much-tried people deserve it.

I hope they get the future they deserve. If that future has a little bit of Worcester stamped on it, I will be ever so proud.