Gender Equality, Public Health & Welfare in Ghana

Thank you for your amazing support for this project.

We have continued to focus on the health & welfare of vulnerable community members, particularly women’s health.

We have recruited a Healthcare & Welfare Officer to oversee our work. We have signed several MOUs with leading local clinics, hospitals and other healthcare providers, who will partner with us to prioritise urgent health cases.  These cases focus on medical or psychological responses to the urgent welfare cases for local children and women. This project is possible, thanks to the support of our donors.

Our project has helped support a range of children with severe medical needs including a student who severely burnt his hand and needed surgery and follow up physiotherapy. We were also able to support a student who broke his leg and needed immediate medical attention. Another case was a woman who collapsed and thanks to your support was able to have surgery for her condition, her doctor said that any longer and the condition would have been life-threatening. We are also excited to see that a student will be able to return to school next year after three years of debilitating pain and illness due to a bacterial infection. Her treatment has been life changing.

Preventative health care is also a key part of this project. We have organised broader community-wide screening and preventative gender-focused healthcare.  We have organised welfare events for breast and cervical cancers, working with local clinics to fund clinical screening.  Our team have delivered educational and awareness talks to local girls and women to help prevent, identify and respond to these conditions. Screening days were free to all attendees and held at a range of local clinics as part of October’s global Breast Cancer Awareness campaign. Over three days, approximately 250 local girls and women attended and received the full range of services sponsored by this project.

In summary, your support has proved critical in helping to support hundreds of vulnerable people from lower socio-economic backgrounds in the community.

On behalf of those individuals, their loved ones, and our entire team, we thank each and every one of you!  Your support has made a difference in so many ways.

Thank you for the ongoing support of this project.

Over the last quarter, we've  aggressively increased the aims, objectives and fundraising activities for this project.

A formal committee of welfare professionals has been created to help train educators and respond to child welfare issues across the community. This includes the first stages of selecting, appointing and formally qualifying eight school councillors; current teaching staff at partner schools who show the requisite skills and aptitude to take on such a role.

For the remainder of 2022, this project will train these individuals in mental health awareness, first aid, behavioural and learning difficulties, and how to identify and respond to suspected cases of child abuse or neglect.

The outcome of this training will be that each of these partner schools will have a single, trained and organised professional who will take the lead in welfare issues, administrate cases, interact with families and local authorities, and offer advice to their colleagues on appropriate welfare and safeguarding responses.

This project should make a considerable, sustainable difference to the ability of local schools to understand and respond to issues of welfare related to their students, improving their abilities to identify and deliver appropriate responses case-by-case.

This process has been supported by the donation and fitting of professional commercial-grade first aid kits at each of the schools, as a first step, and a schedule of training and qualifications is being developed as we speak. You donations have been valuable in setting this up.

We've increased partnership relations with a number of organisations focused on the health of women and children such as a newly built Child & Women’s Health Centre in Kokrobite village.  

We've also formed an alliance with a U.S. based medical NGO called Gold Coast Medical, who travel annually to Ghana to provide free, broad ranging health screening and treatment events. After a successful first event this quarter, we hosted an event involving 50 medical professionals where 300 community members received consultations and treatment for a range of local health conditions. The event was a huge success and we are now the preferred partner for that organisation to deliver these types of events on an annual basis.

In addition, our team continues to deliver hundreds of hours of classes, workshops and activities across the community each month, educating on health and welfare issues, from gender violence, to first aid, to menstrual health.  We facilitate knowledge and expertise to a group of over 1000 children on a monthly basis, covering a vast array of difficult and often taboo subjects and creating a safe environment for children, particularly girls, to ask questions about their bodies, welfare and concerns. 

Huge thanks to everyone has donated to this important and urgent work that is truly changing lives and improving the health of children and women. Our work in Ghana has never been more important!

Thank you, 

The Ghana Team

Over the last quarter, the GVI Ghana team has strategically moved towards providing a broader safety, welfare and social protection net for the women and children of the Ga South region of Accra. Building on our previous work in first aid training, menstrual hygiene awareness, and mental health support, we have introduced training models, workshops and activities across a broader range of gender-critical subjects. These include domestic violence, gender based violence, building appropriate and effective relationships, confidence, bodily autonomy and consent, and many more, and they have been delivered to women and children across multiple communities and through more than a dozen local partner organisations. GVI Ghana has worked with the Ghanaian Government’s Department of Social Welfare to better understand local legal and procedural structures and actors, seek improvements in case reporting, communication and confidentiality, and to pass all of this knowledge on to community leaders, head teachers, and other key stake holders.

In addition, and as a staff team consisting of more than 90% female staff, we continue to fund and support the individual care, treatment and protection of many local women and girls on a case-by-case basis. From rehousing families who have become evicted due to lack of employment, to facilitating professional mental health and trauma support to children who have been the victims of abuse, to providing the funding to deliver longterm medical care to women who are suffering from a broad range of gendered and often critical health concerns. This work is complex, sensitive and has required that we forge contracts and relationships with a broad range of professional medical and psychological clinics and experts. To this effect, on Friday 18th March 2022 we will be the primary sponsor of the launch of a brand new Women & Children’s Healthcare Clinic in Oshieye, Greater Accra, a clinic we will work in partnership with to provide geographically closer and better specialised healthcare to local women and children.

Over the next quarter, our team will seek to expand our social welfare net even further, and to forge relationships with new community groups, new medical partners and new communities. The most vulnerable women and children in the 6 communities we currently work in number into the thousands, and a considerable investment in time, energy and finances are required to protect them. This work absolutely changes, and sometimes even saves, lives, and we are incredibly grateful to all of our friends at GlobalGiving, our past donors, and any future donors or partners who have made this possible and/or would like to continue to support our mission.

Heartfelt thanks.

From the GVI Ghana Team and the women and children of Ghana.

Over the last quarter GVI has continued to meet its existing program targets in Ghana in relation to 3 key areas of women’s empowerment and health as outlined in our last report: menstrual health for school students; first aid training for local women; and a collaboration with the Ghana Girl Guides Association to educate local children on sanitation, hygiene and women’s rights. Our team has delivered 8 workshops to 600 female students from local schools in menstrual health and hygiene, distributing over 1000 sanitary pads and wipes free-of-charge. We have trained and certified an additional 30 local women in adult and child first aid, empowering a critical first line in injury and illness response in communities where access to affordable local healthcare its limited. And we have worked with 6 schools to raise awareness in oral hygiene, COVID safety and the use of face masks/sanitisers. Much of this work has been completed through a lens of women’s empowerment, with project activities pro-actively encouraging discussions and the framing of information from a position of gendered equality. These project areas have become a main stay of GVI’s women’s empowerment work in Ghana and will continue throughout 2021/22.

Our team continues to address the challenges facing the families of Kokrobite in relation to health: More than 500 children have been sponsored by GVI - in collaboration with the Ghana Health Service - to have their Ghana National Health Insurance Scheme access renewed or registered for the first time. By inviting and sponsoring Ghana Health Service registration teams to the community and talking with schools, parents and children about the importance of seeking professional consultations and diagnosis when healthcare concerns present, GVI has encouraged hundreds of families to prioritise modern medicine over less effective traditional medicines, whilst also meeting the costs of subscription to healthcare insurance to provide a critical reduction in front line costs for those families. This has proven particularly important as many families continue to recover financially from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the economy.

Finally, we've invested in the expansion of our vocational training programs for local women. Kokrobite is a popular tourist destination but many local women do not have the skills or knowledge to identify how they might tap into tourism spending to help support their families. GVI now runs an almost daily and ongoing classes in beading, jewellery making and artisan crafts, with women from the local community continuing to attend regularly and learn exciting new skills that support the creation of wares that can be sold for profit on and around the local beaches, bars and restaurants. The program has been delivered by local female artisans teaching often unemployed local mums for 8 hours a week over each month. Dozens of local women are now competent manufacturers of jewellery and are able to supplement their traditional incomes as a result.

These projects tend to be focused on the passing of knowledge and skills and so are relatively low cost in relation to material resource. However, our ability to engage third-party professionals - such as Health Service officials and competent workshop instructors - and to meet the costs of their time and professional services, does require ongoing support from our amazing donor community. Every penny we receive through GlobalGiving helps us sustain and expand our programs in Ghana. We therefore warmly welcome any future offers of support from the GlobalGiving community.

Thank you for your generous support and warm wishes from us and our partners in Kokrobite!