Women Economic Empowerment: Snail Farm in Ghana

Dear Team,

The second quarter of the snail farm project is getting really interesting. We bought 480 snails, although is not recommended to buy the snails from the market – because they are in stressful conditions - we coordinated with a snail market seller to bring us fresh snails straight from the farm. We have been able to keep these snails during the rainy season. We also saw many eggs at some point but due to the heavy downpour of the rain – which still enters the pen in some areas – the eggs could not hatch properly. From the ones that hatched only 24 snails survived. The adult snails also suffered, 63 adults died on the journey, which we attribute to the same water problem, falling down from a distance and stress due to environmental change. As of today, 21^st September 2018, we have 441 snails, and many eggs which we hope will hatch.

In September, the participants started training in business management, marketing techniques, and snail biology. Through the partnership with “Universitá Bocconi” from Milano, Italy, our intern Sofia Milesi is training the six participants from Monday to Friday on how to be good managers and market their product well. Also, Núria, the Farm Leader, has also started teaching the women on snail biology each Sunday.  It has not been easy for the women, their main challenge is the language barrier between them and the instructors – but surely they are having fun doing their best to speak “broken English”, Eunice says.

After the Sunday lecture on African snail’s biology, we hold a weekly meeting with the participants’ full team. The meeting aim is to create a cooperative environment within all the participants and ensure the success of our farm. Therefore, we discuss issues that arise during the week, update members on activities done or to come, revise our schedule, plan resources needed for the following week, and any other topics that are brought up.

It has not been easy to start, but we know that we are slowly increasing our capacity and skills, and this will lead us to the success. The steps planned for next quarter are:

- To reduce mortality of the snails: ensuring that the water does not penetrate in the snail pen and the snails do not fall down;

- To reduce the language barrier: inviting a twi-english translator as a temporal measure and teach English to participants.

We believe that the above measures will improve the current situation and simplify our work on the project.

We would like to give all of you another big thank you and encourage you to keep supporting us in all you can. We hope soon the participants will be Super-Snail-Women and with your continued support, they will be starting their own snail farms.