The Covid 19 crisis in Ghana has had a detrimental impact on our ability to deliver our services to rural communities. As you can see from the picture attached  the Covid 19 situation in Ghana has not been terrible. Early lockdown, school closures and social distancing has had the desired effect.

But this of course has prevented us from continuing on on-going work with school children, thereby halting such interventions as Lights to Learn and Cycle 2 Success.

In April we launched our Covid 19 Children’s Emergency Response Appeal. Due to the global pandemic of Coronavirus/Covid 19 we saw an emerging health crisis in the rural communities we serve in West Africa

So  we implemented the following measures:

• Liaised with community leaders to assess need and prepare the communities to reduce their infection rates
• In collaboration with community leaders, we set up and maintained handwashing stations in 11 remote rural villages
• Provided  soap 11 rural villages to use at the handwashing stations
• Reached remote rural villages with public health messages on the importance of hygiene and sanitation, especially focused hand washing. These actions were conducted with full social distancing measures.
• Offered the use of the school poly tanks for communities to use for handwashing
• Trained our staff to use our vehicles as ambulances in emergency situations and provide correct PPE and deep cleaning facilities.

Our initial interventions of handwashing stations and health messaging was taken up by local government so we felt that the team’s time could be better spent building and installing hand washing and safe drinking water facilities at schools while they remained closed thereby allowing the team to work safely with social distancing measures.

During this crisis, our CEO Neil Kerfoot has gone on furlough to save the charity some money. We made this decision  so that our focus can be on paying our staff in Ghana, so they can keep working and be able to support their families and communities. We have of course lost all our 2020 volunteers, due to travel restrictions, who make up over 30% of our funding  and also many ongoing corporate donations have been withdrawn due to financial hardship. It is our hope to weather the storm and resume normal service as soon as possible.