Fitba tops for school kids

Ghanaian's are crazy about football.
In February I sent round an email to a fairly large circle of people asking if they had any old kids football tops that they would be happy to pass on to the kids in the Koforidua, expecting I’m maybe come back with 20 or 30 tops to hand out to a few people. How wrong could I be. The response was unbelievable and my poor parents ended up with a living room full of 306 items of football gear, including 201 various replica club shirts, 19 pairs of boots, 48
pairs of replica shorts and 6 pairs of replica socks. On top of this, Alves
Primary School provided a full set of strips, Eskmill Boys Club of Penicuik provided
two sets and Glasgow Rangers FC youth team supplied another set.. A couple of likely lads can be seen below sporting the colours of their favourites for the last time.
Many of the donations are clearly of great sentimental value, including two
toddler tops dedicated to Aberdeen’s 1983 Cup Winner’s Cup and 1984 League and
Cup Double triumphs, several to Henrik Larsson’s brilliance at Celtic and
Barcelona, two to 60 years of the legendary Penicuik Hearts, some to misty memories of Scotland’s last visits to the World Cup, various to times spent in Australia, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Malta, Italy, Monaco and Turkey, and not to mention one paying homage to the Cellar Bar in St Andrew’s.

The generous donators in full were:
Alves Primary School
Eskmill Boys Club
Clydesdale Hockey Club (Don Sinclair, Richard Jack, Russell Bradley, Steve Maitles, Johnny Mackay)
Gregor & Ruaridh
Ben, Sarah & Friends
Alistair Moles
Adam Jacques
Lorna Sibbald & Daniel
Alastair McWhirter
Thomas, Angus & Friends
Kris
Evin
Michael
Cadell
Graeme & Sheila
Rangers FC
Jill Morton

As well as this we brought back £400 in donations from a well known Edinburgh employer towards more strips. What on earth to do with them all? Well I spent many happy hours sorting them into roughly colour-matching sets and decided to give one or two sets to some of the schools with teams of boys and girls. My good friend Benedicta (local education officer) helped select the most worthy schools and worked with Aidan and I to distribute them fairly, with Benedicta always reminding us to insist on the girls getting a fair shot!

Agavenya PS & JHS





Bonya PS & JHS



Asikasu PS & JHS



Jumapo JHS


Densuano PS



Eskmill Boys Club of Penicuik provided two full sets of shirts, shorts and socks – really good quality strips – that they’d recently won the local Salmon Cup in. We
donated these to Bonya Primary and Junior High School, who now proudly display the newspaper clipping of Eskmill Boys Club on their notice board.

Bonya and Agavenya Schools arranged a friendly tournament to celebrate their new
kits. In two thrilling contests played before a raucous capacity crowd of chanting, dancing school kids (and subject to frequent pitch invasions), the girls’ .match went to penalties and was won by Agavenya, in the boys match a strong Bonya line-up edged past a nippy skillful Agavenya side 1-0. All the kids seemed really proud to step out in the new kits





Eskmill Boys Club http://www.eskmillfc.co.uk/EFC-Teams/u14-team

There are still more strips to hand out and Benedicta is on the case, so I’ll post up more photos when I get them.

Primary School Partnerships

Not long before our tropical disease-induced flit to the UK, I started going round some schools with a local education officer, Benedicta Addo. She is a gem – a driven and selfless individual committed to the school children she is there to help. Her main role is to try to keep female students in school, but she has also heloped a few schools develop links with volunteers in the past.
She and I, with the support of Aidan Cantwell, have linked up two schools in Ghana with two in Scotland. The idea is to give them the opportunity to exchange cultural and educational learning between pupils, teachers and communities.
We spent a lot of time identifying schools here that were committed to the idea and then took them through the process of developing their understanding of what was involved, how they should prepare and how both schools could get out of it what they wanted. The principal challenge was to embed the understanding that for a partnership to work it has to be equal and therefore shared learning should be at the core of the relationship rather than a donor-recipient situation.
The partnerships are between
Mile 50/ Adweso Primary School, Koforidua and Skene Square Primary School, Aberdeen (http://www.skenesquare.aberdeen.sch.uk/)
And
Densuano Primary School, Densuano and Alves Primary School, Alves, Morayshire (http://www.alves.moray.sch.uk/)

You can learn about the Scottish schools from their websites.

Mile 50/ Adweso School is located on the south edge of Koforidua with an interesting mix of students from all social and cultural backgrounds. My esteemed visitors Mike and Evin were treated to some dancing and drumming performed by the kids, as you can see below.









Densuano is located in the eponymous village approximately 10km along a dirt track out of Koforidua. It’s a relatively new school and was built following a campaign by the local community, with huge support from the village chief. Alves Primary School gifted a set of football strips to the school and some gifts are winging their way back to Scotland as we speak.













So far things are at an early stage but I hope to post more more partnership updates in future as they develop.
Andy

Cadbury Cocoa Partnership (CCP) – Skills Training

Before Christmas it was obvious that the principal aim of my CCP role was never going to quite work out. During December I re-focused on what I could actually achieve.
VSO is managing the project in the Eastern Region and is doing so by working with several Government sector partners (Ministry of Agriculture, Depts of Co-operatives, Community Development, Social Welfare, and the Cocoa Board (aka CocoBod). One of the objectives of the project is to strengthen the ability of these institutions to run the project and support the communities.
I therefore agreed with those concerned that I would assess the skills the staff needed, make some recommendations for delivery of training to enhance these skills and try to deliver some it myself before leaving.
With the help of some other volunteers, flip charts and post-it notes, I facilitated the partner staff to come up with what they needed/ wanted to improve on, married this with the upcoming project activities and made some recommendations for formal training, mentoring, practical tuition etc, along with costs and a proposed timetable.
Things move pretty slowly and by now it was mid-April. I had until mid-May to try to deliver some of the proposed training and so quickly sought and received approval for budget to deliver some of the skills requested by the staff.
Responsibility and power in most workplaces in the country seems to be retained by the few, with those further down the chain getting few opportunities to develop and neither receiving nor requesting information about the bigger picture. This commonly leads to misunderstandings, duplication, frustrations, de-motivation, a complete lack of proactivity, constant fire-fighting and, in the case of projects, complete failure to go in the right direction.
It’s really valuable to see just how bad things can be on a project, and particularly to see it from the perspective of a relative outsider. There are plenty of blunders being made here that I’ve made myself in the past, and problems surfacing that looking back I now see more clearly from many more perspectives than just my own. While I may commonly be heard to bemoan the bureaucracy and constraints of working in the UK, seeing things here makes you appreciate some of the structure and working practices you’re accustomed to.
During the consultation phase, many team members had asked for project management or work planning training of some sort. Hannah Curtis, another volunteer, and I developed a two-day course covering the fundamentals of these topics, with emphasis on (as well as a little theory): project planning; communication; delegation, motivation and time management, all aimed at beginning to address some of the issues mentioned above. Some of you may stifle a few giggles at the thought of me teaching someone else about time management, but I’ve always talked a good game.
Having watched a few workshops here before and witnessing everyone dozing off while someone lectured at the front, I was really conscious of the need to keep the subject matter at the right level and also to give the participants the opportunity to learn from practical sessions rather than direct teaching. We worked incredibly hard preparing interesting activities and key learning points and I could not have been happier with the result - I don’t think I’ve been more satisfied with a training session I’ve been involved in delivering. I saw so much potential in people that I’d completely written off before as unmotivated or completely lazy. It’s never been so starkly apparent to me that if you give people room, they’ll thrive.
There were 35 participants and most came to us at some point with huge compliments for the course, from junior staff who took a lot of learning about the importance of taking on responsibility and planning out activities, to senior and very capable people who said it helped them critically analyse what they were doing themselves and how to improve it. There were also a lot of compliments about the style of participative learning which I hope will start to embed itself in the project a little more.
So what was the impact? Well, who knows? I’d love to have got this moving much more quickly and to better embed responsibility for the teaching. I tried to do this as best I could in the time available by giving the partner staff themselves ownership and responsibility for the continuous training report and agreed a timetable with them and VSO. Some of the other volunteers have agreed to take forward more of the training.
As with any training, it’s only useful if you actually practice it and I think for the project management stuff it will need more in-depth training for key members of staff. However I like to think some of the key messages were taken on board. And I really hope that the open-ness we all developed in that workshop will be carried in a small way into their working lives. I’ll always remember that alertness, enthusiasm and potential that the participants showed and how good it felt.
For me, I’m quite proud of myself for not taking the easy option on this project and just walking away as it was all too tempting to do. I put a lot of work into this and it feels like it paid off. Sadly it’s probably the case that I’ve learned a lot more from th experience than anyone else has from me being here. But just now I feel that I’ve done the best I could. I honestly feel that, more than in any other previous job, I’ve remained intelligent, focused on my own goals and positive. These were some of the lessons I’d hoped to learn from a complete change of working environment and I think I had the freedom to do that once I forced myself to lift my head and look around at what was happening.
Andy

Michael and Evin's Big Trip South

We had the exquisite pleasure of the company of a couple of true gents during the last two weeks of our stay in Ghana. We also had Evin and Mike over.
Here's a few highlights of their trip, which included communicating through the medium of drumming, getting fitted by a drunken grieving tailor, following ant colonies and skint his knees during a chaotic Man Utd goal celebration at the local spot (unfortunately no photographic evidence of this one).

Anyhow, thanks a million for spending your hols with us - brilliant laugh and helped us seen many old aspects of Ghana afresh.

Ability Bikes

Ability Bikes is a bike mechanic and retail shop whose core business is to receive discarded or broken American and British bikes by shipment, repair them and sell them on for a profit. Nothing particularly remarkable about that – it’s fairly common practice in Africa where there is practically no domestic bike manufacturing industry.

However the interesting thing about this bike shop is that it is run and staffed entirely by people who have some form of physical disability, mainly caused by polio during childhood. Polio is pretty rare in Europe because of the vaccinations we get as babies, but you can’t walk down the street in Ghana without seeing a few people with twisted or missing limbs that is often the mark of a polio victim. More often than not, children with such disabilities are seen as a burden to the family and their prospects in life are relatively limited.

Ability Bikes was established in 2008 by 7 Koforiduans with the assistance and training of David Brannigan (http://bikesnotbombs.org/ability-meeting) to develop their technical skills as mechanics and business managers. Maud and Torsu run the shop and carry out the administration, Mirriam, Agyen, Lizzy, Julius and Sule run the workshop. All are co-owners.

This is quite a big year for them as they’re trying to make a significant shift in their sales numbers, moving away from selling wholesale to other bike dealers, to mostly selling direct to the public in order to maximise revenue and start to consistently make a profit without subsidy.

I was working with them from January to June to help implement an inventory system and develop a basic marketing plan. With the former they had a really smooth delivery in April and now have a good and simple stock accounting system.


With the latter they spent several weeks identifying and analysing their core markets and deciding on the actions required to tap into them – prioritising the low cost, high impact actions. I provided a bit of guidance. Maude and Torsu will now take forward the plan and design some stickers and leaflets, organise school and workplace demonstrations, arrange product placement in key locations around the town and other things to boost sales.




It’s been absolutely brilliant working with these folk. They are the most fun-loving, sharp-witted, entertaining group of people I’ve come across. I’d love to stay in touch with their progress when I get back – and help wheneer needed. It was quite sad to leave them and they reminded me a lot of what I miss most about being back home – random banter.

I should mention that Agyen is planning to do a few bike rides through Ghana to try to raise awareness for disabled people and possibly some funding for disability projects. Ultimately he hopes to do a circuit of Ghana. He’s looking for sponsorship to cover his costs but I wondered if he could do a relatively short ride, get a bit of publicity, set up a sponsorship page etc. I know the guys in the states are looking at this but if anyone has any experience in this area, please get in touch.

Web links
http://bikesnotbombs.org/ability-meeting
http://www.withmyowntwowheels.org/mirriam
http://www.flickr.com/photos/39302532@N04/sets/72157625872280523/detail/

Bumbling Tourists upgrade?

Mike & Evin arrive tomorrow. Can't wait to see Evin in this heat ...b'Jeezuz...

Media-watch

Lucy's review of Cape Coast's Fetu Afahye Festival is available online in the Herald Magazine 14th May edition. Unfortunately you have to register but you can take a free trial for 3 days and then cancel.

http://theherald.newspaperdirect.com

It's a brilliant read. Almost makes me wish I could go... Eh? Oh! Hang on...
Andy