[PHOTOS] Training with ISUOG
[PHOTOS] ARHF at Adventist Girls SHS
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.
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.
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.