By Matt Craig | Program Manager
Our work in Ghana is multi-faceted and often overlaps in its focus areas. Our team works in gender equality, public health, education, and social justice, but often these labels are more usefully understood as categories for us to manage and organise our work internally. In reality, on the ground, the individual women and children benefit from a multitude of projects we deliver across all of these program areas, an approach known as an integrated development practice.
Working alongside one of our partner schools in the community, our project supports education for identified students for example, by paying term fees, supporting them with books and uniforms and on occasion support for boarding facilities.
In the classroom, students are taught by teachers who had received a range of training led by our project team. Topics include; children’s first aid, fire safety, positive reinforcement, and identifying learning difficulties.
This project works with every one of our partner schools locally to provide 1-to-1 mentoring for any students who need additional support, and this support can lead to students catching up with the other students in their year level.
School facilities include classrooms that have been built and decorated using funds from this project. The project also supports furniture for classrooms.
Students are also supported by a range of extracurricular and welfare-related services through this project. These include: attending menstrual health workshops and receiving free sanitary products, attending lessons on confidence and building healthy relationships, mental health awareness, COVID awareness, domestic or gender-based violence, sexual health, online safety, and consent,
Students of appropriate age also have attended a breast and cervical cancer awareness and screening event sponsored by our project.
Other training is nutrition/cooking classes, malaria awareness and responses classes, and self-defence classes. We've even supported students in joining the activities of the Ghana Girl Guides Association - another close partner of our project. This leads to an active friend and social support structures.
We want to highlight the achievement of one of the students who have been involved in these programs. She received a formal offer letter to attend one of the best of the best colleges in Ghana, which we have already funded via a scholarship in advance, until graduation. A college renowned for alumni that include many of Ghana’s most influential, powerful, talented and impressive women.
This is how our project utilises integrated development approaches. All of these designed and funded classes, interventions, activities or support systems constitute a project in and of themselves, which we run for hundreds of local women and children, many of whom will engage in and benefit from these projects. Projects which are purposefully designed to complement and work together in unison to empower, protect and provide safe spaces for women and children.
Like white blood cells swarming together to attack an infection in the body, as do projects create a collective force that helps insulates our stakeholders from society’s challenges. The assistance provided by our broad, holistic, otherwise unavailable locally, is specifically designed to add up to more than the sums of the individual projects.
This is smart, integrated, sustainable development!
As a fully integrated community entity in Kokrobite, we work closely with all our partners and stakeholders to establish these ‘joined-up’ ways of maximising our impact and giving local people a combination of support that allows them to take control and define their destinies.
To all our partners, friends and donors who make this possible, we thank you from the bottom of our hearts. Success stories- are created every week in Ghana... because of you!
Thank you!
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