Humanist Action: Ghana Update

You may have noticed that the Humanist Action: Ghana (HA: Ghana) has been silent on social media in the first months of 2018.  We want to bring you up to date on an eventful few months.

As you may know, HA: Ghana launched in Ghana’s Northern Region in support of Songtaba, a grassroots women’s rights organization. Over the past three years, we have dedicated ourselves to learning about their programs and methods. In addition to supporting various projects, we helped Songtaba make improvements in every area of its internal operations.

Most HA: Ghana projects focused on the community of Kukuo, a sanctuary for women accused of witchcraft and then banished from their communities. In partnership with Songtaba and with your support, we helped return 14 women safely to society and provided agriculture and business training to empower not just the reintegrated women, but the entire community of Kukuo.

Near the halfway point of the 2016-17 service year, violence related to a chieftaincy conflict broke out in Bimbilla (the location of Songtaba’s main office and where the HA: Ghana team was living and working). We were already exploring additional partnerships in the Northern Region and had identified a potential partner in Yendi: Bang-Gu Manga Integrated Rural Development Society (BIRDS), another women’s and children’s rights NGO working in the Gnani sanctuary for alleged witches. To ensure no future bouts of violence would affect the HA: Ghana team, everyone moved from Bimbilla to Yendi to work with BIRDS.

In light of communication and other issues we encountered with BIRDS, we now feel that the decision to start work with the organization was premature. In hindsight, we would have chosen to send the 2016-2017 team home when we moved them out of Bimbilla while Yvonne and Wendy evaluated the BIRDS organization. The 2017-2018 volunteering team was able to complete some meaningful projects, including a vocational training project that has put six Yendi residents on the path toward a career as tailors, but circumstances prevented the team from being as productive as we had hoped.

In December the 2017-2018 HA: Ghana team left Yendi as a mutual decision between the volunteers and FBB leadership. We have now entered a new phase of our HA: Ghana program, which is an evaluation and improvement process to determine how best to use knowledge gained from the Northern Region as we transition to other parts of Ghana. While we always expected to bring the HA: Ghana program to other parts of Ghana, we never expected it to happen so abruptly. We value our work in the north and are continuing our partnerships there to build on our accomplishments, but do not plan to have anyone based in the north at this time. We hope HA: Ghana personnel will return at some point in the future.

After extensive research we recognized the Central region as a potential location and Cape Coast, the capital of the region, as a central base for our team. Yvonne, our HA: Ghana coordinator moved to Cape Coast in January to carry on with phase II. Stay tuned for another post soon as we update you on the program’s accomplishments since January.

We’d love to hear your questions and comments. Thanks for your ongoing support!

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