Ghana

Bethel Takumi-Demonstration School
Ghana

I was brought here initially as part of my third year at Trent University, in efforts to complete a degree in International Development Studies. I came back to the country to continue work supporting a village school project I became involved with during my practical field placement-volunteering section of the academic course. Since then I have had my eyes opened to the tragedy of an utter lack of government provisioning in the educational sector, among many other abandoned sectors of society.

Children living in the Volta lakes areas are hard at work, often recruited to make fishing nets or wade the waters for fish everyday, sometimes even denied by their own village people the chance to eat the very fish they catch. Children are not spending enough time in the classroom, rather they are engaged in labour activities that can even further marginalize and exploit them in a world they seem to drift farther and farther from understanding.

In both the rural and urban areas, quality education is always a matter of money. Those who are not able to support their children's education with the generous school fees and erroneous fees demanded are the same people who find themselves enrolling their children in poor-quality government run schools, or in worst cases, no school at all. In villages where quality teachers are less likely to be found, the teachers of these village schools can be anybody, regardless of educational background/teaching experience.

Children in the rural areas and in the urban areas who do not come from wealthy backgrounds are my biggest motivating factor for being back in Ghana. I don't believe that a lack of wealth should leave these brilliant, athletic and keen children to be left wandering the streets in search of work, giving little thought to the vitality of a decent education.

We see the micro-credit bank as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a village dweller to have access to an amount of money that can allow them to learn skills they might never acquire otherwise. We believe that the above mentioned micro-credit project idea will help to alleviate the problem of parents lacking the financial resources to make the necessary payments for their child to be enrolled in school and be well-taught. Not only will they be able to pay the fees if they are successful and motivated to learn the skills of business taught to them in the free seminars, but they will also be able to help their community members to build up their businesses with the new knowledge acquired. As this is a village setting, agricultural knowledge will be shared openly and freely during seminars to ensure successful proposals of business plans, as it is assumed that the majority of the submitted business plans will be of the agricultural nature.

A trial project with as many as 36 families will be implemented to enable them to send their kids to school.

Please help with this important initiative!