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SoCCs Hemaa – The Queen of SoCCs

By Lord M. Nixon

Meet Agnes Nti, one of the very first women to benefit from health screenings and the SoCCs small loans scheme in the Bantama Market. She sells condiments and a variety of food items. As she is she is seen as a leader amongst her peers, she is affectionately called “SoCCs Hemaa” ( literally translated as SoCCs Queen) in the Bantama Market. She is a four time beneficiary of the small loan scheme under the SoCCs project

On a routine tour of the market in March, she invited me to her shop for a brief conversation. After about 4 minutes of conversation, I noticed she was offloading various food items ranging from canned tomato paste to shea butter into a new shop next to her own. I asked if she was helping a friend offload her goods, she smiled and told me that was her new shop. The conversation then got very interesting as she started to explain how the loans had gradually helped her expand her business, create a healthy savings account and allow her to be more financially independent as she does not borrow from loan sharks anymore.

To me, this is a very progressive woman who understands the SoCCs program and has made positive use of the knowledge and skills she has acquired from the program. Furthermore, she is serving as a positive role model for the women in the Bantama community as most of her peers hold her in high regard.

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Agnes Nti in front of her new shop.

 

 

 

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Agnes Nti standing in between her old and new shops.

 

Deworming Exercise in Basic Schools in Kumasi

WHW in conjunction with the Kumasi Metro Health and Education  departments will contact a  deworming exercise in basic schools in April 2016. The exercise will begin on Monday April 4 in four educational circuits of the Metropolis namely Amankwatia, Old Tafo, Santase and Asem circuits.

The exercise has been made possible by the donation of 705,000 tablets of  the wormicide, Vermox by AmeriCares, a  USA based humanitarian organization and funding support by WomenStrong International.

A team of two from AmeriCares will be in Kumasi from April 2 to 8, 2016 to participate in the activity.

 

One Woman’s First Steps to Wellness

A Life-Altering Journey to Health and Increased Wealth

Madam Adwoa Tawiah is a vegetable oil trader who has been operating in Bantama Market – the second largest market in Kumasi, Ghana – for the past three years. Responsible for a younger sibling and three children, Mme. Tawiah also cares for her aging mother, who lives in her hometown, some 35 miles away.

For nearly two years, Madam Tawiah had been managing all this while battling extreme fatigue, bodily pain and insomnia among other symptoms, when Women’s Health to Wealth (WHW) – a member of WomenStrong International’s Consortium dedicated to empowering women and girls to become agents of change – started our women’s health screening project in the Bantama Market. This screening project was designed as an entry point into a small loans scheme with the goal of enhancing the businesses and economic vitality of these impoverished market women.

When her screenings revealed hypertension and pre-diabetes, Mme. Tawiah was seen and put on a treatment plan by WHW’s attending physician. She now attends monthly check-ups and obtains her monthly medication free of charge from the Bantama Market Clinic, thanks to medical supplies procured through WHW partners AmeriCares and WomenStrong International (WSI). Mme. Tawiah is full of praise for the initiative, as she now is in better health and finally understands that her ailment was not due to any negative spiritual forces, as she had been led to believe.

But recovering her physical health and wellbeing were only the beginning: having been through the health screenings, Mme. Tawiah was now qualified to access WHW’s collateral-free small loans scheme under the Social Capital Credits (SoCCs) program.“SoCCs” offer impoverished women access to a financial “bartering” scheme that counters money-based poverty by enabling them to earn and spend from a community-developed menu of goods and services. And indeed, Mme. Tawiah has had to deal with serious business-related problems, in addition to her physical ones. Because of Ghana’s severe energy crisis, she told WHW, food vendors and caterers who relied on electricity to store their foodstuffs were purchasing less of her oil, since it would spoil, given the constant and protracted power outages. Moreover, her competitors were selling in unauthorized places, leaving her cut off from prospective customers and further damaging her business.

So together with four other pre-qualified colleagues, Madam Tawiah formed the “Nyame ne Hene” (“God is King”) savings group, through which she has obtained two successive loans of 500 GH ($150), which she used to enhance her inventory by purchasing an additional 20 gallons of oil. Although the loans have been helpful, Mme. Tawiah says she is looking forward to being able to take out a loan twice that size: now feeling healthy, with a few more assets and able to dream farther ahead, she intends to use the increased earnings and loans accessed through WHW’s Social Capital Credits program to help her children complete their education and to build her own home, over the years to come.

 

Using Girls’ Clubs to Improve Literacy in the Ashanti Region

Female literacy is one of the key interventions pursued by Women’s Health to Wealth (WHW) to help transform the lives of women and girls in our areas of operation in Ghana’s Ashanti region.

Currently, middle school (here, junior high) is the highest level of educational attainment for fully half of the girls in WHW’s area, which is centered in Ashanti’s capital city, Kumasi, and includes the surrounding periurban communities. This incomplete education adversely affects the girls’ potential earnings, as they end up with jobs that keep them trapped in the lowest wealth quintiles, thereby perpetuating the poverty cycle and its respective undesirable effects on the health of women and their eventual dependants.

As a strategy for promoting girls’ education up to senior high school, WHW decided to expand our Girls’ Clubs program from Kumasi schools to junior high schools in severely depressed communities in the seven districts bordering the city that have been noted for low enrollments of girls in both junior and senior high. The Clubs provide a safe place for girls to establish their identities and develop the emotional strength to interface successfully with their community.

At the invitation of the districts’ education teams, WHW started preparatory activities in March 2015 by holding meetings in those districts where we were already working to improve the health of the area’s many market women by offering health screenings at our regular mobile clinics. Our meetings concluded with the enthusiastic district teams’ selecting the communities and school facilitators who would participate in the program and determining specific timelines for training the facilitators and starting the programme.

Training of Facilitators: From May 19-21, 2015, WHW led a three-day residential training workshop for the 19 schools-based facilitators and three District Girl Child Coordinators that covered in some depth those issues adversely affecting girls’ education and ways to address them through the Girls’ Clubs.

The objectives of the training were as follows:

  • To identify and explore factors adversely affecting the education of girls in our communities,
  • To explore with facilitators some possible strategies to address the issues raised;
  • To orient facilitators on WHW
  • To review and train facilitators on the WHW Girls’ Club draft curriculum
  • To finalise timelines for the start of Girls’ Clubs in their schools.

At the end of the workshop, the facilitators’ evaluations made clear that they felt strongly empowered by the training and were extremely eager to start the Clubs in their respective schools.

The facilitators then set about encouraging the Grade 7 girls in their schools to register for Club membership and decided to hold the first session during the week of June 8, 2015. In two communities, registration was opened up to girls in Grades 5 and 6, as WHW was told that these girls kept dropping out at grade 5, due to unintended pregnancies. It was hoped that, with a safe space to come to, together with other girls and facilitators, such pregnancies might be avoided, going forward.

Uses of Technology: During the three-day facilitators’ workshop, WHW staff helped them create Internet accounts on their smartphones. The “WhatsApp” application was used to develop a page that could facilitate communication between WHW and facilitators, as facilitators deemed this application as more user-friendly than getting on the Internet.

The WhatsApp page has greatly influenced communication and feedback between WHW and participating schools by reducing costs and speeding up information transfer between parties. Facilitators use the page mainly to report back to WHW on their weekly meetings, while WHW uses it to share information and to provide feedback to facilitators.

Next Steps: We anticipate a surge in membership in the existing Clubs at the start of the next academic season. However, we intend to keep the numbers no higher than 30 per Club, in order to give the facilitators enough time to spend with each girl.

WHW’s goal is to expand the Girls’ Clubs to six new junior high schools before the close of 2015.

Interested in continuing the conversation about Education?

“Be a Strong Girl — Know the Facts!” Girls at Simms Senior High Learn More About Reproductive Health

On the 55th anniversary of Ghana’s Republic Day on July 1, 2015, Women’s Health to Wealth used this public holiday to hold the first in its series of Adolescent Reproductive Health Fora (ARHF) for female students of the Simms Senior High School in the Kwabre East district of the Ashanti Region. The theme for the forum was “Be a Strong Girl – Know the Facts!”

The high and unacceptable rates of teenage pregnancy of 99 in 1000 live births in the region coupled with high rates of complications of unsafe abortions among girls in secondary institutions, and the low completion rates of girls in second-cycle institutions in the region prompted WHW to include the ARHF as one of its strategies to address this menace.

WHW used this opportunity to inform and educate the girls on adolescent reproductive health issues, provide a platform for girls to share problems related to their sexuality, and also identify girls who would be used as peer educators in the school.

Funding for the program was through the kind support of Women Strong International. WHW partner AmeriCares supported the Forum by providing each girl with a pack of sanitary towels, panty liners and 2 toothbrushes, to improve their personal hygiene. Marie Stopes International also supported the forum, with the donation of 100 branded exercise books, 30 note pads, 100 key holders as souvenirs and 200 handbills on useful reproductive health information for the girls.

Participants

334 female students and 10 tutors from the school, nine facilitators from the WHW Girls Clubs in the Afigya Kwabre and Kwabre East districts, two resource persons each attended the forum from the Ghana Health Service and Marie Stopes International, as well as five staff members of WHW.

What Happened

The Assistant Headmistress, Cassandra Antobre in her address after an opening prayer by Mary Boakye, the Senior House Mistress of Simms, stressed the timeliness and appropriate nature of the forum and urged the students to take advantage of the presence of the resource persons to seek answers to their health and sexuality issues.

The WHW Executive Director, Nana Abenaa Akuamoa-Boateng, gave an overview of WHW’s objectives with regards to female literacy, and she introduced the rest of the invited guests. She shared the statistics based on Demographic and Health Surveys on adolescent reproductive health issues from the global to the local setting, such as teenage pregnancy, contraception, unsafe abortion, anaemia, education, mental health and injuries.

Ms Memuna Yankasa Mahama, a Senior Nutrition Officer of the Ghana Health Service provided education on nutrition during adolescence. She stressed on the need to eat balanced meals, with emphasis on adequate intake of fruits and vegetables and reduction in fatty and sugary foods.

She stressed on need for routine exercise and talked about good and inexpensive ways, like dancing, walking briskly and jogging where possible.

Mr Peter Titiati, the Regional Coordinator for the Youth Project at Marie Stopes International,addressed the issue of having a positive self-image. He talked about the need for girls to be confident, to have a lot of knowledge and skills, to take pride in who they are, to identify and know what to do in order to boost their confidence, and to always place their education first. It is only then that they can actually control their sexuality.

The girls were given the opportunity to pose questions to the panel. The questions covered a variety of topics from menstruation, sex and sexually transmitted infections (STI), through contraceptives to the issue of sexual abuse by some guardians.

Mr Simeon Acheampong, Regional Manager for Marie Stopes International, also proved to be an invaluable resource during the discussion period, and together with the panel provided concrete and practical responses to questions asked. Several students also interacted with members of the panel on a one-on-one basis after the forum to seek guidance on highly personal issues. Girls with STIs were referred to the Marie Stopes centre for management.

Observations and Findings

  • The school does not have an infirmary where girls can go when they are ill
  • The majority of the girls had been given some amount of adolescent reproductive health knowledge from their female teachers, and they had no problems talking about condom use
  • 60% of the questions posed to the panel were related to sexual and contraception issues, 30% were related to menstruation and menstrual issues, 9% were related to candidiasis and the remaining 1% talked about anaemia and its effect on the individual’s studies
  • The panel gave very brief but concrete responses to questions asked by girls
  • A large number of the girls had specific problems they wanted to discuss with the panelists after the program
  • The program was very interesting for the gathering, as the majority of them seemed excited -21 girls voluntarily registered with WHW to train as peer educators for the school. The training will be organized during the upcoming vacation period. The trained team will form the nucleus of the WHW Girls Club in the school.

Recommendations

After a brief meeting after the forum between the WHW team and the GHS team, the following suggestions were made for subsequent fora:

  • More time should be allotted to issues regarding Sexually Transmitted Infections, as most of the questions were focused on sexual issues.
  • The time for the program was short, and an additional hour should be added.

Next Steps

  • WHW to liaise with GHS for training program for peer educators.
  • The Assistant Headmistress to coordinate with WHW on possible ARHF at Antoa Senior High School before end of July 2015.

Interested in continuing the conversation about Health and Wellness?

Girls’ Clubs: Why We’re Here

Mary Dufie, 14, is a Grade 7 pupil at Worakose Junior High School and a member of the WHW Girls’ Club in the Ashanti region’s Bosomtwe district. Mary (not her real name) is the only girl in her family, born between her two male siblings.

Mary’s parents operate a drinking bar where the top-selling drink is the locally brewed drink known as “Akpeteshie.” Unfortunately for Mary and her brothers, their parents have a great affinity for their product and are almost always busy and drunk, therefore paying little or no attention to their children’s daily needs. This has resulted in hunger and neglect and has led to Mary’s brothers’ abandoning school and idling about in the neighborhood.

Mary caught the attention of the WHW facilitator, who has reached out to others and is working to help the child continue with her education and not succumb to the pressure from her parents to stop schooling and assist them in their trade.

Mary and six other girls with similarly heartbreaking stories of parental neglect are currently being helped by WHW to put body and soul back together and to stay in school.

Getting Teenage Mothers Back To School

Every year a girl stays in school can increase in her future income by 10 percent, and when women earn more, they are more likely than men to spend the money on food, health, family and education. But there are many obstacles to overcome in keeping girls in school.

In the Kwabre East District of the Ashanti region, teenage pregnancy is a leading cause of girls dropping out. But Nancy Boakyewaa, a determined 16-year-old mother, is defying the trend, proving that even the most vulnerable adolescent girl can, with the right support, begin to feel safe again, recover her appetite for learning and unite her community behind her.

Born on June 14, 1999, Nancy is the seventh of 10 children of Comfort Boakye, a farmer, and Joseph Boakye, the Roman Catholic catechist in the community.

In August, after dating a young man in her community, Nancy gave birth to a baby girl, whom she named Josephine Maame Abena Boakye. We first met Nancy in July at the Krobo District Assembly Junior High School Girls’ Club, where, under a program supported by WomenStrong International, we were counselling teenage and expectant mothers about their future. After intense counselling sessions with Nancy and her mother, Nancy agreed to go back to school after giving birth, if her mother would look after baby Josephine.

Now in Grade 7, Nancy is excited to be back in school. “It feels as though I never left because everyone makes me feel good about being back,” she says.

Support comes from everyone. Her mother brings the baby to school, and her teachers give her time in between classes to breastfeed. Women’s Health to Wealth provides some financial support to Nancy and her mother for the baby and for school supplies, and her classmates have also been very supportive.

Nancy sees herself becoming a nurse in the future. Of staying in school, she says,

“I am doing this first for myself, for my little girl and for your organisation that gives hope to people like me. I want to further my education to improve upon my life and secure my baby’s future. I also want to support my family in the future.”

Thanks to the timely, far-sighted intervention by WHW, Nancy’s dream has a better shot at actually becoming her reality, thereby improving her and her family’s chances of leading fruitful, more fulfilling lives freed of extreme hardship.

 

Building Confidence Through Team Sport: A Girls’ Clubs Football Match

Regular exercise by adolescents is known to promote physical fitness, reduce stress and improve classroom performance. Team sports in particular enhance adolescents’ social and psychological development, including confidence, goal-setting and leadership: all critical to developing strong, healthy, empowered young women, a primary goal of Women’s Health to Wealth and its partner organization WomenStrong International.

With its 15 Girls’ Clubs in 14 communities in three districts in and around Kumasi, Women’s Health to Wealth (WHW) seeks to further these adolescent development goals among girls in the Ashanti region.

To this end, on Friday, November 20, girls in the Afigya Kwabre district of Ashanti competed in a football match, or, in American parlance, a soccer game. The smaller girls from Swedru Junior High School were intimidated by the tall, athletic stature of the girls at Wawase Junior High School, but played valiantly for 70 minutes. At the end of the match, Wawase came out victorious, 2-0.

After the game WHW Girls’ Clubs Coordinator Sheila Effah-Kyei led a discussion about confidence, one of the seven key strengths emphasized in the Girls’ Clubs’ curriculum. The girls learned how confidence can help them overcome obstacles in their lives by focusing on achieving their goals, rather than on their perceived limitations.

The football game was a welcome new activity for the Girls’ Club, getting everyone out of the classroom and interacting with girls from different schools. After this success, WHW will continue to explore innovative ways to collaborate with the girls on their roads to self-discovery.

DripDrop Saves Lives: Notes from the Pediatric Emergency Unit in Kumasi, Ghana

Dehydration in children younger than five years of age as a result of diarrhea and vomiting, malarial fever and other infections, is a major contributory cause of mortality in under-5s in Ghana. The ominous nature of dehydration in children warrants an immediate and effective restoration of body water balance, to forestall death. Reducing child mortality has been a key goal of the international community for decades; improving child and family health, perhaps the most essential goal for women worldwide, is a critical objective of Women’s Health to Wealth and WomenStrong International.

The Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital (KATH) Pediatric Emergency Unit, or PEU, is where children with such acute febrile conditions as severe malaria, diarrhea, vomiting, bacterial and viral infections and other acute medical conditions are initially admitted and stabilized before being transferred to wards for further treatment or discharged.

Severe diarrhea and vomiting, either as an additional symptom to an underlying disease or as a diagnosis itself, is the third most frequent cause of admission to the PEU. In July 2015, Women’s Health to Wealth donated 30 cases of DripDrop® Hydration Powder to the PEU, containing 5760 units of 10g packs, to assist the unit in the effective management of dehydration of children with indicative conditions.

The most widely used cure for rehydration, for these diseases as for severe malnutrition, is oral rehydration solution, or ORS, which combine sugars, salts and other ingredients and which is credited with saving some three million children annually. Most of the solutions on the market don’t taste very good, however, meaning that children well enough to balk at the unappetizing or medicinal taste simply won’t drink the stuff. The formula for DripDrop®, developed by a San Francisco-based family physician, Dr. Eduardo Dolhun, combines medical-standard hydration with child-friendly flavors, making it easier and more appealing for children to get the solution down and to finish the course of treatment. Dr. Dolhun’s ORS product has gained wide acceptance in hospitals and is now marketed through his own firm, DripDrop Inc.

In September, two months after the DripDrop donation was made, WHW paid a follow-up visit to KATH’s PEU to discuss with the staff the usefulness or otherwise of the medication and the relative effectiveness of DripDrop® as compared with other oral rehydration salts in preventing or reversing dehydration. As attested to by some key PEU staff, illustrated below, the results are clear, and striking:

Mrs Felicia Boakye-Agyeman, Matron-in-Charge of the Pediatric Emergency Unit at Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital:

“Since DripDrop® Hydration Powder was received till now (a period of two months after the donation), the ward admitted 51 cases of diarrhea and vomiting. These children were given DripDrop® oral rehydration solution prepared at the unit. All 51 cases tolerated the drug very well, and over 90 percent of the cases had the diarrhea stopping completely within 24hrs. Unlike the other oral rehydration solutions, the DripDrop® solution has a very pleasant taste, and the children willingly consume adequate amounts with little no coaxing, thereby ensuring complete rehydration within a significantly shorter period.”

Dr. Maame Serwaa Asafo Agyei, a PEU pediatrician:

I observed that the DripDrop® oral solution causes the dehydration in the children to reduce and stop more promptly. I have also noted that because of the fruity taste of DripDrop® oral solution, the children are able to take in more, as compared with the other types of solutions, and this has helped to minimize the number of children eventually requiring intravenous fluids to correct their dehydration. The inclusion of zinc in the DripDrop® Hydration powder eliminates the additional zinc tablet that has to be added to the other oral rehydration solutions that have no zinc. This product is superb.

Now there has been a reduction in number of admissions of cases of diarrhea and vomiting, because when they such cases come to the PEU and the solution is prepared and given to them, their condition improves so quickly that they are discharged home with some of the drug. DripDrop® is a good drug that has come to support our interventions for diarrhea control. We thank Women’s Health to Wealth for the donation of the drug to the unit.

The usefulness of the DripDrop® Hydration Powder in addressing the rehydration of children with diarrhea and vomiting at the KATH PEU is worthy of note, as it not only reduces the workload of the already overworked staff, hospital costs and health bills for families but ultimately saves lives! Women’s Health to Wealth would like to acknowledge the support of our partner, AmeriCares, who made the supplies possible, and to WomenStrong International, which supports all the activities of WHW.

Bantama SoCCs Participants Clean Up Their Community

In mid-November a clean-up exercise was organized by the women of the Bantama community who are members of the Social Capital Credits (SoCCs) groups created by Women’s Health to Wealth (WHW) in partnership with WomenStrong International (WSI). The clean-up was an example of the WHW’s and WSI’s activities focused on two of women’s 6 essential needs: economic empowerment and creating a functioning urban environment.

All of the SoCCs group women are market traders eager for their area to be more orderly, less dusty or garbage-ridden, and more attractive to shoppers, to improve their daily sales. Eighty women from Bantama’s three SoCCs groups participated in this exercise, which ran from 11:00am -1:30pm. Participants gathered at the Bantama Ebenezer Methodist Church, where their SoCCs meetings are usually held, and proceeded into the surrounding streets and pavements, where business activities were ongoing.

The clean-up focused on the vegetables and plantain section of the market, where a lot of rotten organic waste had heaped up. Surrounding areas where the women swept and tidied up the grounds included the church premises. The women earned between 10 and 20 SoCCs points for their efforts, depending on the extent of their participation as determined by their groups’ SoCCs managers, who determined that those who swept the church premises and other external surroundings without helping to remove the rotten waste heap would earn 10 points, while those who did both would earn 20. Each SoCCs group has its own menu for how these earned points can be spent; items range from making incremental improvements to their own market stalls (an extra table, or expanding the array of wares for sale) to paying the cost of a child’s school fees, and include other desired goods and services, all selected by the group members themselves.bantama

Because the activity was organized on a very busy Wednesday morning, when market activity was at its peak, traders camped along the sidewalks were reluctant to let the energetic Bantama women sweep the pavement where they were conducting their business transactions. Nevertheless, the SoCCs women, sporting their WHW T-shirts, went about their business, without interfering with ongoing sales. Designed to help the program gain exposure, the WHW T-shirts came in handy, as many women were curious to know who these WHW cleaner-uppers were and what we were about.

The “social currency” of earning SoCCs enabled these conversations, which hopefully will attract more market women to come to WHW’s clinics to be screened, so that they can then be prequalified to enroll in WHW’s savings and SoCCs groups: “women’s health to wealth,” indeed!