Rita Korkor Agyei built brands in Ghanaian telecoms, African fintech and regional coffee before an MBA took her to EY in the United States. Two years into advising large enterprises on their technology spending, her argument is that African operating experience is an export; not a career to be started over.
Rita Korkor Agyei spends her working weeks inside the technology budgets of large American enterprises. As a senior consultant in technology strategy and operations at EY in Chicago, she has designed and implemented an IT Supplier Management Office; a governance framework covering third-party technology spending; and leads the agile delivery teams building the tooling behind it. It is a long way from the fintech role she took in 2017, and in her telling the distance is much shorter than the geography suggests.
That job did not exist until she accepted it. NSANO, a fintech operating across four African markets, had never had a head of marketing. She was two and a half years out of Vodafone Ghana, and the brief amounted to a single sentence: build the function.
“It came with no manual, and I was thrown into the deep,” she has said of the appointment. She stood up a brand identity, ran strategy for the company’s business and consumer arms, took on employee engagement and internal communications, managed a budget and reported to the chief executive; while the company itself was still deciding what it was. By her account she laid the foundation for the brands, social and digital footprint and grew it by double digits from an almost zero baseline.
The export thesis
The conventional framing of the African professional abroad is one of starting again: a foreign degree to convert the CV, an entry-level rung to re-earn. Agyei rejects the premise, and now has two years of US practice behind the rejection.
“Growing a business in a market with thin data, a limited budget and four countries to cover teaches you a specific kind of judgement,” she says. “You learn to decide with less. Enterprises here have large budgets to acquire data and it’s important that with the data, we give the right visibility to drive decisions, whether 3rd party spend or large technology investments, data driven judgement is a crucial driver for business decision making.
Her CV supports the claim in unusually concrete terms. At Nestlé’s Central and West Africa region, as brand manager for NESCAFÉ in the coffee business unit, she led the rollout of a new regional website, worked with the search team on an effective SEO strategy and deployed tooling to gather first-party data; the same first-party data problem still occupying marketing departments in London and New York. She was named a “Digital Warrior” for the region in 2020, best performing employee in the coffee business unit in 2021, and Nestlé featured her in its own recruitment campaign for its regional digital marketing team.
She also read law along the way. In June 2020 the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration admitted her to the degree of Bachelor of Laws, second class honours, upper division, studied around a full-time job; an unglamorous credential that now underpins her work on supplier contracts and regulatory exposure.
The work she left behind in Accra has its own witnesses. [Miriam Adjei- Otchewmah, Marketing Manager, Nestlé Central and West Africa], worked with her through that period and is the person best placed to say whether any of it survived her departure.
[ I worked alongside Rita during her time in Nestle CWAR, and I remember how efficient she was in her role, especially digital marketing. She did pioneering work when it came to building the NESCAFE e-business strategy, worked on the regional website roll out in 3 languages and pushed hard on SEO and first party data collection. It wasn’t surprised when she was recognised as Digital Warrior title and featured in the recruitment campaign for the regional digital team
Agyei’s own account is drier. “I did not leave behind a campaign, I left behind a way of deciding,” she says. “Campaigns expire. A team that knows how to set a baseline before it spends money will keep working long after everyone has forgotten who set the first one.”
The MBA as a second language
The move to the United States came through Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, where she completed an MBA in 2024 with a double major in marketing and business analytics, interned with EY in Chicago in the summer of 2023 and returned as a senior consultant.
She is precise about what the degree was for. “I did the MBA to add a language and skillset, not to leave marketing behind,” she has said. The switch into technology consulting was not a repudiation of the first career: the product management work in fintech supported agile delivery, the CRM implementation at Nestlé supported enterprise systems work, and the budgeting and portfolio discipline transferred directly.
Business school was also where she stopped hedging. She won four case competitions and was runner-up in two more, served as president of the Africa Business Club and coached undergraduates through consulting interviews. She held Forte, Mary B. Daily and Peter Stuart Holmquest fellowships, and had earlier held a Norwegian Quota Scheme fellowship.
What the corridor is worth
For readers in London and Accra alike, the interesting question is what firms do with people who have run multi-market operations under constraint. Agyei’s answer is that the corridor between African operating experience and global professional services is badly underused in both directions; firms abroad discount the experience on arrival, and firms at home lose the people permanently rather than building the kind of two-way relationship that keeps expertise circulating.
“The discount is applied at the interview, not at the desk,” she says. “Nobody has ever told me, once the work started, that running four markets on a startup budget was poor preparation. They tell me it before the work starts, when all they have is the CV and a country name they have decided means junior.”
She is a Fellow of the Commonwealth Academy of Leadership and Management, a professional body registered in the United Kingdom, conferred in November 2020 on nomination by the academy’s African regional council, and a Fellow of the Institute of Management Consultants since 2023.
Asked what she brought with her from Accra that she would not have learned in Chicago, she does not reach for anything sentimental. “The habit of defining the metric before you fall in love with the idea,” she says. “You acquire that quickly when nobody is going to fund the second attempt.”
