The Cedi Bead Factory is the famous traditional bead-making workshop at Odumase-Krobo in the Eastern Region of Ghana — the beating heart of the Krobo people's centuries-old bead culture, and one of the country's best-loved cultural tourism stops. It was founded by **Nana Kwesi Cedi**, a master bead-maker who turned a family craft into a celebrated enterprise, and today it is run by his son **Nana Kwesi Cedi II** (also known as Cedi Beedi), who has carried the tradition forward and welcomed visitors from around the world. The factory sits in the Krobo hills near Somanya and Odumase, the ancestral home of the Krobo (Dangme) people, whose name is inseparable from Ghanaian beads. The craft itself is powder-glass bead-making, a technique the Krobo perfected. The process is beautifully simple and deeply skilled: - **Sorting and crushing** — old glass bottles, broken windows and discarded glass are sorted by colour, then pounded into fine powder using a mortar and pestle. - **Filling the mould** — the coloured powder is layered into clay or metal moulds around a thin cassava-stem or metal rod that forms the bead's hole. The layering is what creates the stripes, swirls and patterns. - **Firing** — the moulds go into a traditional kiln (originally a termite-mound furnace, now often a modern kiln) and are fired until the glass fuses. - **Finishing** — the beads are removed, the rod cleaned out, and the beads are washed, polished and strung into necklaces, bracelets, waist beads and ceremonial pieces. Krobo beads are far more than jewellery. Among the Krobo and wider Dangme people, beads mark every major passage of life — birth, puberty (the famous *Dipo* initiation rites), marriage, chieftaincy and death. A woman's bead collection is a form of wealth and identity, and certain beads carry proverbs, status and spiritual meaning. The famous *Krobo* powder-glass beads are prized across West Africa and increasingly collected internationally as art. The Cedi Bead Factory has become a model of cultural entrepreneurship: it employs local artisans, trains apprentices, and welcomes tourists, school groups and researchers who come to watch the full process from broken bottle to finished bead. It has featured in countless travel documentaries and is a fixture on Ghana's cultural tourism circuit, sitting alongside the Krobo Mountain and the annual Ngmayem festival of the Manya Krobo. If you're planning a visit, it's at Odumase-Krobo, roughly an hour and a half from Accra via the Akuapem hills — and you can buy directly from the makers. As the Akan say, *"Nyame na ɔyɛ adeɛ nyinaa"* — but here in Krobo, it's the hands of the bead-maker that turn discarded glass into treasure.