"Helping girls make the grade in Ghana"
When 21-year-old Olloriak Sawade, an international development student at the University of Guelph in Ontario, first signed up for an overseas program, she wasn't sure how it was going to turn out.
Despite her misgivings, she took a leap of faith, joining the "Trent in Ghana Program," set up by Trent University in Peterborough, Ont., near her home town of Havelock. In the fall of 2000, Olloriak set out for West Africa. She spent two months in Ghana's capital, Accra, taking classes with both Canadians and Ghanaians on the economics, history, and philosophy of Ghana. Afterward, she went to Tamale, in the Northern Region, to study development practices and assess the needs of the local community.
Bringing girls into the classroom
The hot, dry region of northern Ghana is home to the poorest and most disadvantaged communities in the country. Life is hard for everyone—especially women and girls. "Exploitation of the girl-child for economic gain in this part of the country is widespread," says Samuel Zan, an education program manager at the Tamale Archdiocesan Development Office.
Most girls stay home, helping their mothers or aunts at housekeeping, farming or other income-generating activities. A growing number run away to the city in hopes of finding a better life. "I saw first-hand in Ghana how girls' enrolment dropped as the grade levels increased," says Olloriak.
The Trent program included an internship with a local non-governmental organization, and Olloriak's interest in girls' education led her to the World University Service of Canada (WUSC). With support from CIDA, WUSC has been working in northern Ghana since 1997 to improve education for girls.
The semicircle of lamps
Olloriak's internship began on January 16, 2001. She travelled to nearby Tumu, where she was warmly welcomed by her new colleagues at WUSC: Yeshe Smith and Shantelle Marcoux. Her first lesson —how to ride a motorbike— would serve her well as she travelled throughout the countryside to help set up primary school libraries, work at an educational resource centre and be a prop manager at community theatre performances that dramatized the need to educate girls.
"The dramas were wonderful," she says. "The audiences were spellbound: they loved every minute of the action. The plays were presented at night under oil lamps, and battery- and solar-powered lamps as well. We held them in varying places, from under the porch of the school to a big field. It was a beautiful sight to see lamps in a semicircle with hundreds of people surrounding the actors in complete silence listening to every word."
"I learned what development can be"
Although she's been back in Canada for several months, her memories are still strong: driving a motorbike, trekking to small villages and sitting under mango trees talking with students about how fun reading can be. "I will never forget when an old man from the parent–teacher association pointed to a dragon in one of the storybooks inquiring what animal it was, as he had never seen anything like it [or] watching one child's eyes light up as he flipped through a book all about dinosaurs."
By the end of her time in Ghana, Olloriak could look back on an internship full of "rewarding experiences and incredible adventures that I am sure to be daydreaming of in my classes next term," she says. "I learned more than I could have imagined." As she worked with the local communities, she also found that her leap of faith was justified. "This experience allowed me to have a better understanding of what development can be, to see the benefits and how people's lives can change through the work you are doing."
Yet educating girls is the best development investment a country can make. For every year of additional primary education, future mothers can reduce infant, child and maternal mortality rates by 10 percent; increase their own productivity and income potential by anywhere from 10 to 30 percent; and improve the quality of life for their families improves enormously.
Olloriak's story was first published in the "Stories from the Field" section of the CIDA website.