Living up to our mantra of hands-on and experiential learning, the collaboration with local projects partners is the centerpiece of this year’s Global Citizenship Conference.
Over two days, conference participants, together with our local project partners, join hearts, hands and minds to tackle pressing challenges that local communities are facing. Working in small teams, conference participants and project partners become learners and solvers alike. Support by top notch mentors, they pool resources, capacities and experiences to generate possible solutions for the identified challenge.
Leading up to the conference, we will connect conference participants and local project partners around the presented challenges, resulting in six small teams. After the teams are formed, we will organize virtual Team Meet & Greet’s so that members can get familiar with each other, learn more about the respective GCC Project and start to explore the challenge at hand. This way, individual members can prepare ahead of time.
At the GCC, each of the teams will go through a guided process covering the following elements:
At the end of the second day, teams will present the outcome(s) of their work to the plenary.
Meet our local project partners, explore the challenges they are bringing to the table, and become part of the solution at the GCC!
Meet Hudson from EduCare.
Educare is a social enterprise that seeks to provide accessible, affordable and quality child care to underprivileged children aged between 2 and 6 years in rural areas of Ghana. EduCare currently operates a center in Berekuso, where it lays foundations for numeracy and literacy, in preparation for elementary school. In addition, they seek to develop the abilities for critical thinking to help the kids understand and relate to the world around them. Their goal: to build literacy and creativity in youngsters.
EduCare’s value proposition is high quality Early Child Education (ECE) at very low cost. For a fee of GH₵ 1.00 (US$ 0.23*) per day, it provides children with the kind of ECE they will receive in a well-resourced and high-end crèche. EduCare wants to train children who are literate and creative problem solvers. The project in Berekuso is a pilot, and intended as a model for other areas in the country.
Challenge: Designing a framework to monitor project progress and assess accomplishment of project goals.
EduCare’s kindergarten curriculum is based on Montessori principles. EduCare wants to know how effectively their kindergarten operates with these principles. They hope to define clear measurements to track their targets for the project at different stages throughout the year. This way, they expect to be in a better position to identify and tackle current and future challenges effectively.
Meet Derick from Tech Era.
Tech Era is an IT literacy program that envisions to create an Africa where IT is a Local Language. At present, Tech Era offers two modules: The Tech Module gives students a basic tutorial in IT by introducing them to Microsoft Office applications and search engines. Students who exhibit high interest and achievements in this first module can participate in the advanced Robotek Module, where they receive tutoring in using robots to solve problems. Since its founding in 2015, Tech Era has trained over 80 high school students from numerous public schools in Berekuso and surroundings.
In addition to building IT skills and nurturing the passion for science, Tech Era seeks to develop students’ capacity for compassionate, ethical leadership and encourages them to actively contribute to solving problems in their communities. Tech Era achieves this through a partnership with the 2019 Ambassadors and the introduction to design thinking approaches.
Challenge: Designing easy-access modules for Information Communications Technology competency building.
Currently TechEra invites pupils to Ashesi to teach them computing and robotics. The schools around Ashesi have few resources, and teachers lack knowledge in information communications technology in order to teach the children effectively. Recently, TechEra joined forces with Teach For Ghana to scale up and to reach more children. Thus, they need to develop modules to teach Information Communications Technology (ICT) that suffices with the little resources available in local Junior High Schools, while at the same time offering a practical and effective approach to engage students around ICTs. By doing this, they hope to equip more than 4000 Ghanaian students in 3 years with relevant IT skills for their personal development.
Meet Abraham from the Ahote Sanitation Project.
TASaP is a Berekuso based sanitation project that seeks to promote environmental sustainability among teenagers through three key programs:
Challenge: Develop an engagement model for the local community to embrace sanitation and environmental sustainability.
TASaP promotes sanitation and environmental sustainability in Berekuso community. However, the streets continue to be full of waste and only a few people participate in organized cleaning runs. TASaP hopes to create impact by working with the local school and including sanitation and waste as part of the curriculum. They are looking for ways to promote sustainability and less litter in the street.
Meet Eunice from Bowney.
Bowney is coined from the words rainbow and journey, and aims to empower underprivileged female high school students from the Berekuso township by maximizing their educational, financial, social and spiritual potential. To accomplish this, Bowney implements two successive modules: ‘A New Dawn’ and ‘BizzGirls’, which is centered around building entrepreneurial capacity in girls.
‘A New Dawn’ comprises of a carefully designed curriculum that is usually taught as weekly electives to girls at local schools and focuses on character development, self awareness and skills training. When completing the curriculum after approximately two months, these girls become a part of the bigger Bowney network, where mentors support, monitor, and look for opportunities for them to enhance their skills. Once part of the network, girls can participate in ‘BizzGirls’, Bowney’s entrepreneurship program providing vocational training and support as the girls develop ideas and plans for businesses.
Challenge: Develop strategies for financial sustainability of the program
Until now, Bowney has mainly relied on donations from friends, family and small donor funds. Though successful, a local fundraiser turned out to be very time consuming and led to only small revenue for the project. Moving forward, Bowney hopes to generate own revenue to sustain the programs to be less depended on money coming from unique donors. Their big question is: How can Bowney generate revenue creatively and consistently? One of the idea so far has been to identify potential funders who would be interested in an organization like Bowney and start engaging them, but there is probably just one out of many options.
Meet Frederick from Sesa Mu.
Sesa Mu is an agri-development organization based in Berekuso that provides training in conservation agriculture and financial resource management for local farmers, while empowering youth to venture into the agricultural value chain. In addition, Sesa Mu seeks to create effective agriculture service systems to increase productivity and introduce easily adoptable innovations for small-scale farmers.
Two operational components are core to Sesa Mu’s strategy:
Challenge: Develop an innovative business approach to growing the Sesa Mu dried fruits business and brand. Sesa Mu Dried Fruits provides a ready market for the predominantly grown Sugarloaf and Smooth Cayenne pineapple varieties by processing it into dried fruits, which is a tasty, natural, on-the-go snack for consumers of all ages. With the dried pineapple product, they seek to encourage more smallholder farmers to increase production of the local pineapple varieties, with dehydration as a method of processing in itself. The value added product can help farmers earn 20% or more on top of the farm gate price of their pineapples. The challenge is to find an innovative marketing and branding approach to tell Sesa Mu’s story to consumers, investors, grant makers etc. This will enable them to garner financial support and other forms of investments to enhance the Sesa Mu’s social cause of value addition through its dried pineapple business.
