Upcoming Project Ghana - June 2019

Education in Ghana was mainly informal before the arrival of European settlers, who built a formal education system addressed to the elites. With the independence of Ghana in 1957, universal education became an important political objective.  In 2011, the primary school net enrollment rate was 84%, described by UNICEF as “far ahead” of the Sub-Saharan average. In its 2013-14 report, the World Economic Forum ranked Ghana 46th out of 148 countries for education system quality. In 2010, Ghana’s literacy rate was 71.5%, with a notable gap between men (78.3%) and women (65.3%).

Even though the above statistics may seem attractive, it does not address the needs of the children and their families. According to educators and government officials, poverty is the major reason Ghanaian students miss school a lot. Despite the country’s strong enrollment rate, Ghana’s levels of poverty are very high, with 30 percent living on less than $1 a day and 54 percent living on less than $2 a day according to WorldVision.org. That means many students across Ghana live in grinding poverty and must help their families by working in the markets, on farms or on fishing boats instead of going to school. Their parents do not have enough money to buy text books, exercise books or writing utensils. 

The purpose of our trip is to go make a difference in the lives of these children and empower them to learn. We will be visiting two villages in Ghana. Lolito in the Volta Region and Abakam in the Central Region of Ghana. Our goal is to provide every single child (roughly 100-130 pupils) in each school a set of school supplies (including pencils, pens, coloring pencils, ruler, notebooks, etc.). In addition to school supplies, we will be organizing reading clinics, delivering more books for the library we started in 2016, and working with local clinics/community health centers delivering medical supplies.  

Project Ghana 2019 will also serve as a Discovery Trip to learn more about the needs of several other underprivileged communities who need basic amenities such as drinking water, classroom renovation and/or assistance in restoring depleted school or clinic infrastructure.