Ghana
Northern Ghana
We run a large seedbank in Ghana helping over 150 women and a very generous donor has provided tractors as well as a multisheller to help this project be successful. The harvest this year is better than last year, although the rains are so unpredictable that the communities struggle to plant the seeds at the best time. In the past when the rains started they did not stop. Now they stop and start. If you plant too early and the rains stops for a few weeks before restarting you will lose your crop. If you plant too late you don’t get a crop.
We also run smaller seed bank projects with our partners SAC helping impoverished women grow soya, ground nut and bambura seeds. Last year the harvest was so bad that the beneficiaries hardly grew more than they planted. This year it has been much better and communities have really benefited from this input. We are very grateful for the hard work put in to these projects by our partners.
Dry season farming
We have been running several Dry Season Farming projects this year in very poor, remote areas of Ghana. York Viking Rotary Club supports one in Gogorinsa; Ripon Rotary club supports three community projects in Dodoma, Goriyir and Beeli and Skegness Rotary club supports the dry season farming project in Sing. Each project supports around 60 families. Traditionally, Africans only grow during the rainy season, leaving the land empty after harvest. The dry season farming projects have been extremely popular with poor communities, who soon notice the benefits of a more varied diet on the health of their children. It also gives the villagers work throughout the year and a supply of produce to sell at local markets. They have neither the equipment, seeds nor know-how to grow crops in the dry season without external help. Also, as the goats run free, they are unable to afford fencing to keep their crops safe. However after an initial project where they are helped with fencing, training, equipment and seeds, these poor communities can continue the project without any external help.
Remote medical clinic – Northern Ghana
In 2023 Drs Alistair and Margaret Robertson visited a medical facility in N. Ghana that is 2 hours away from any other medical services. The clinic offered maternity care, some surgery and medical in-patient care as well as outpatients. It was run by a young doctor who had worked with no break for the last 18 months. They were struggling because they did not have a ward for children, meaning that any ill children had to be admitted to the adult ward, where there were often patients sleeping on the floor. Thanks to a generous donation, we have been able to build a simple paediatric ward so that no patients have to sleep on the floor when they are ill.
Sanitary Pads
In the current ‘ecological aware’ climate we are very focused on re-usable items. In Africa they are desperate to find re-usable solutions because of limited finances and resources. In the Upper West Region of Ghana, the teenage girls often miss school during the week of their period because they are unable to buy any sanitary products. They haven’t the money and there are no pads available even if they had. Girls’ education is not seen as important, so they are encouraged just to stay at home. The girls have to use rags of old cloth and have very limited water resources to wash them in. It is estimated that 11.5 million women in Ghana lack hygiene/sanitation management facilities that adequately separate waste from human contact. Many girls drop out of school altogether when they start menstruating.
We have been running projects that teach teenage girls how to make re-usable sanitary pads and give them some sexual health education since 2021. In April this year we did our largest project to date, training over 433 girls in Wa, a major town in the Upper West region of Ghana which is very poor. It is hard to overstate the importance of this project which enables the girls to stay in school instead of staying at home whenever they have periods. Missing school means that their numeracy and literacy skills will be poor. In that case, the only employment available to them is subsistence farming. With just a few more years of education they can learn enough to be able to get a job as a waitress or make a small business for themselves, saving them from a life of abject poverty.
JWA was approached by Skegness Rotary Club, who wanted to supply sanitary products to a school. To supply one pack of pads to 1000 senior high school students in two deprived schools would cost £886. This would last each girl one month (one period max). Instead, we proposed to teach the girls how to make re-usable pads. So, for the same amount of money we can provide a pack of reusable sanitary pads to around 2-300 senior high school, and teach them how to make these pads for themselves. At the same time, the girls are also given some sexual health education. This means that not only the teenage girls, but also all their female family members benefit. Skegness Rotary club is trying to raise the money for this project. If you are interested in supporting this we would be very grateful for your help! The more money we get the more girls we can help.
Well Drilling in Ghana
Drinking polluted water is still one of the primary causes of illness in West Africa. Thanks to some wonderful donations, in 2019 we have been able to provide several communities with fresh water. We were able to install a borehole in a community in the Northern Region of Ghana called NyoliKoraa, who were previously using surface water because their old borehole was broken. There are 1078 adults and 400 children who are benefitting from this borehole. We have also repaired the boreholes in two other communities in upper west province, namely Kolingo (500 people) and Goriyiri (300 people)
Well Drilling
In autumn 2023 autumn, our CEO John Beynon visited our existing projects in Burkina Faso, taking along Paul Brown, a retired Engineer who had spent a couple of years buying and refurbishing a second hand well drilling rig. As is often the case when shipping vehicles to Africa, someone in the port had stolen all the diesel and had probably tried to steal the drilling rig itself except they couldn’t manage to start it (there was a hidden immobilizer switch that they
hadn’t found). When they couldn’t start the engine, they took
various parts of the engine to pieces to try and start the truck, but when they still couldn’t start it, they put the pieces back on, in the wrong order, hence damaging the engine! After a couple of days of fixing the drilling rig, Paul was finally able to drill our first bore hole, whilst at the same time teaching a group of Africans how to use the machine, so that they could continue using the machine once Paul was no-longer in the country. As you can see, we successfully drilled down to the water and made our first bore hole. Since returning to the UK, the team have continued to use the machine, recently drilling a bore hole at one of the local hospitals which was previously purchasing all the water it needed from donkey carts! We hope that this machine will enable us to drill many more wells for needy projects and communities. The cost of drilling, now we have our own machine is roughly half of the cost of using commercial drillers.
The ABC school in Bobo recently held a special seminar for the girls in the school, teaching them about issues such as female hygiene, the risk of unprotected sex and how to keep themselves safe in
relationships. Out of a couple hundred girls, 41 were facing serious domestic or social problems. For example, one girl doesn’t know her father. Her mother recently married a man who doesn’t want the girl,
so she is living with another family far away who took her in, but she needs to walk 2 hours to get to school. Another girl at the school had a baby last year, but the baby died. Her father is also dead, and the
mother has no income and is unable to cope. They have resorted to eating rubbish off the street as they have no other way to manage. Another girl’s father died when the girl was very young. A friend of the father took over the care of the girl and her mother went back to her village. After a while this friend died and his son took over the care of the girl. He is a very harsh man and won’t allow the girl out of the house, apart from going to school, even to meet her mother. Sadly, this is how life is for many girls in Africa. Fortunately, however, some of these girls are now being cared for in the home for abandoned girls that we built in 2019.
