Mobile phone card stand in Ghana
It’s funny how local needs and constraints in developing countries often don’t line up with development assistance interventions. I had a first-hand encounter with this on a visit to the Akuapem North School District to get to know one of the likely partners in the youth media literacy program we are developing in Ghana in connection with the Press Freedom 2.0 initiative.
On our way to the meeting, along the road to Akropong, I enjoyed some of the things that make Ghana, Ghana. Things like, the shops with religious names like God is Good Fast Food (indeed), Fear Not Fashion Home, and my personal favorite, Christ in You Pastries. The many stands along the road where people sell a few items, like groundnuts, or phone cards. The worn and rugged conditions of roads and buildings that comforting because they are beyond “keeping up appearances”, and are really just things.
Meeting with the School District
First, we met with the head of the school district, and some of his support staff, to explain the program we were developing, and see where there might be opportunities and needs.
I’m a big proponent of building programs around local needs, and not just what a development organization THINKS should be there. I want to hear from the target audience what kinds of challenges they face and what they might be willing to invest their energy in to ensure that resources are dedicated where they will be most effective, and minimize waste. I don’t take taxpayer money for granted, which is where a lot of development assistance comes from. I don’t like to waste anyone’s time, or create anything that is just going to sit there. Resources are too scarce, and there is far too much need out there that doesn’t get the attention that it should.
Mural celebrating the man who brought the cocoa tree to Ghana
We told him that the program would be much like the one our local partner, Media in Education Trust-Ghana (MiET-Gh), had done before. Establish a cluster of 7-10 schools around a central school that the others can reach for training. Go to the central school, conduct a one-day workshop, bringing together three teachers from each school, train them on lessons and methodologies for teaching youth how to think critically about news media and media messages, have those teachers go back to their schools and teach three other teachers, and then those teachers subsequently start teaching what they learned in their classes. Then, a few weeks later, a follow up visit is made to the central school to meet with teachers, see how things are going, help address questions/concerns. Of course, attention must be paid to how to ensure that everything happens between the training and the follow up. I’ll save convo on that for another post. Anyway, that’s the gist.
Also, given the dearth of teaching resources (a huge issue in rural Ghana), particularly newspapers and handbooks, we will set up training resource centers in the central schools to house these materials.
In talking with the district reps, some interesting development issues were revealed.
Programs Crowding Out Other Programs
These are the places I like to visit in Ghana
MiET-Gh did a similar program a few years ago, funded by USAID, in which they taught newspapers as a resource for teaching methodology. Aka, rather than just being stuck with an instructor’s book, using a newspaper to teach the content, instead. In talking to the district, it turns out that USAID did another teacher training program afterward that taught a whole new set of methodologies. The effect was that the teachers stopped doing much of what they learned from MiET-Gh, and started doing the news ones. Sounds like this is typical, where one program teaches a methodology, then another teaches a new one, so the previous one gets dropped.
Lesson learned: Develop your programs with awareness of what programs came before to complement them, rather than minimize their lasting benefits, otherwise you somewhat negate instead of adding value. Also, develop your programs to build in incentive for teachers to stick with what they’ve learned in a training.
A Few New Computers is Better Than a Bunch of Old Ones
I asked them if there were computer labs we could tap into, if we decided to go the route of incorporating new media. Outside of the big cities in Ghana, odds are not in your favor of finding a good computer lab for training. But, good to explore.
The Bob Marley recording studio had a fire just before my visit to Ghana
They said that, yes, in fact, there was a computer lab. However, the computers were donated years ago, and were rather old to begin with, so they might greatly limit how useful they would be for training. I mentioned that we were still looking through our budget opportunities, and that there might be room to purchase some computers. But, if we were to do that, was there any assurance that they would be housed somewhere that teachers and youth could readily access? I mentioned that in my experience in Ukraine, there were tons of computer labs built by development assistance that were behind locked doors gathering dust (Remind me sometime to write a post about what it was like to bring a Ukraine education system context to Ghana, where it seems like Ghanaians are MUCH more open to trying new things). They assured me this wasn’t a problem.
Then an interesting comment was made by the director. He said that if we were to send computers, he would much rather have a few new, good ones than a bunch of old ones, and that it seemed like the old ones he received were sent because Westerners were too guilty to just throw them away, so they donated them. While they liked the gesture, the old computers were fairly worthless to them (it’s awfully hard to run Windows XP or 7 on computers that were already old ten years ago, and computers are advancing exponentially, rendering even recent computers obsolete much faster).
Oh, and including a generator in the donation would also be nice, he said, since electricity isn’t really a given in rural Ghana, and computers end up just taking space (and make great paperweights for industrial-sized jobs) without electricity.
Lesson learned: If providing or sending computers, send a few news ones, not a bunch of old ones, because old ones mostly just collect dust. Also, send a generator.
A One Laptop Per Child Test Case Only Strengthens My Skepticism
After the meeting, we visited one of the local schools that might be one of the training sites. Classrooms were as expected, basically cement walls, a cement floor, a roof, windows open to let in air, no electrical lighting, just the ambient sunlight, a chalkboard, a teacher, and a room packed with desks and kids. Sounds like any classroom, except that, if you were to describe every detail of a classroom in, say, Philadelphia, you have A LOT more than just this list. In this school, as in most schools I have seen in Ghana, this is as far as you can describe it. Nothing more.
Author’s Note: As I was writing this, it got kind of long, and made more sense as its own post, so I created one here, with the same name as this header, “A One Laptop Per Child Test Case Only Strengthens My Skepticism“. I don’t usually double post in a day, so today’s a bonus day.
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