This help for sustainable development in Pebi and Kumbungu follows a recent decision by the Kavli Trust to continue and extend its backing for the Danish organisation 100% for the Children.
Supported by the trust since 2015, Pebi is a small fishing community on the Ghanaian coast marginalised by location, lack of infrastructure and language barriers. A sign of this is that most of its residents are illiterate.
Basis
The trust’s support for creating a bakery and a kitchen garden, and for providing teacher resources at the local school, has laid the basis for increasing Pebi’s economic self-sufficiency.
Established in 2015, the kitchen garden is intended to supply fruit and vegetables for a school meals scheme covering 85 children. It is also hoped that production can be increased sufficiently to permit sales to the local market.
100% for the Children plans to build further in 2016 and 2017 on the positive experience it has gained, and to experiment with new vegetables and livestock.
Expertise
Opening a bakery will create new expertise and be particularly important in providing jobs for local women. In that way, new manufacturers and entrepreneurs can emerge and help to improve the community’s self-image.
In the longer term, the goal is for bread sales to cover wages in the bakery as well as part of teacher salaries. The local teaching staff lack official qualifications, and support from the trust to enhance their education is very important for the future of Pebi’s children.
Dreams
Many young women in northern Ghana’s Kumbungu district have dreams and ambitions which far outstrip their opportunities. Many get no further than primary school. Among the most important of the many reasons for this are lack of money, ignorance of the value of an education and the favouritism shown to boys.
The trust started making financial contributions in 2015 to induce more young girls to continue or resume their schooling. One of the many positive results of this work is an increase in self-respect among females and pride at their own ability to learn. This transmitted an important message to the local community that women can pursue further education and would like to do so.
The project will continue in 2016 and 2017 with some new elements, which partly involve working on the quality of rural education. Greater efforts will also be devoted to convincing the local authorities that women’s education should be strengthened and recognised as a basic right.
Empowerment
Through the Rural Education for Empowerment Programme (Reep), its local partner, 100% to the Children will also launch a pilot project on school mothers in 2016-17. This scheme involves getting older women to function as role models for the schoolgirls, particularly on discussing sensitive issues.
These matters, which often help to keep the girls away from school, include teenage pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases and menstruation. The hope is that the school mothers can act as agents of change and can create a new sense of self-awareness among the girls.