Kids Press Their Case: Effecting Community Empowerment through Citizen Journalism
If we wish to create a lasting peace we must begin with the children.
–Mahatma Gandhi
Pretty much all the honest truth telling there is in the world is done by children.
–Oliver Wendell Holmes
The story of Ghana is one punctuated by triumphs and defeats, progress and decline. From the promise of independence to the despair of military dictatorships, Ghana has been through thick and thin through the past five decades. Since the election of Jerry Rawlings as president in 1992, however, the Ghanaian democracy has been strengthened and the economy has been revitalized. Rawlings peacefully passed power to the opposition after losing the 2000 election, and power passed back to Rawlings’s party in 2008. These successful transfers of power contrast strongly with the confusion and violence manifest with elections in Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Nigeria.
Behind this visage of progress and promise, however, is a more pervasive truth: the ranks of Ghana’s poor are largely locked out of the country’s newfound prosperity. The roads of Accra are plied by fleets of black BMW 7 Series sedans, and yet children in nearby slums lack the shoes to walk to school. Certainly, the reasons for such social stagnation are multifaceted, and include problems of housing, sanitation, healthcare, and access to capital. However, two intertwined reasons include bureaucratic neglect and lack of access to quality education.
Engineers Without Borders – Princeton University has started a project in Ashaiman, Ghana, to help address problems associated with education in this community. Ashaiman is a large town on the outskirts of Accra with few opportunities for educational advancement for its children. Parents, most of whom are day-laborers in the nearby port, are largely uneducated themselves and barely literate in the local language, let alone English. However, if their children fail to grasp English sufficiently, the children will find that their employment options will be limited in future years, because most jobs in Ghana require or will require English fluency. The EWB-Princeton project in Ashaiman involves building a library for a school and developing a new, innovative literacy curriculum for the school in conjunction with Johnson Park Elementary School in Princeton.
However, while EWB-Princeton’s project addresses concerns about education, I would like to go one step further and address concerns about bureaucratic neglect in Ashaiman. My proposed project, then, is to work with EWB-Princeton’s partner school in Ashaiman, EP Basic, and start a children’s community newspaper that will address and discuss issues of local importance. Ashaiman currently lacks its own newspaper, and a student newspaper will fill this vacuum. The newspaper will serve as the community’s voice, and will allow children to expose problems which plague life in Ashaiman. This newspaper will be provocative and opinionated: by helping shape the public discussion, children will finally get bring their views to the table.
Students ages 12-17 will work together to produce this monthly periodical, and in order to allow the children to speak freely, the newspaper will be published without by-lines. This project is timely because it follows a year of youth-led riots in Ashaiman. Youth were demanding more attention from the central government, and wanted Ashaiman to be granted “municipality” status. The same fervor which drove youth to the streets can drive them to influence opinions and decisions with words instead.
Implementation of this project is quite straightforward. Articles will be written in both English and Twi, first by hand, and then transcribed into Microsoft Publisher. I will train students over the summer to use Microsoft Publisher to prepare the newspaper. After each edition is ready, it will be sent to a printer in Accra where hundreds of copies will be made. These copies will be distributed free throughout Ashaiman in public places. I will raise funds such that the newspaper can continue to be published even after the summer project is over.
My interests in international development have been largely academic and impersonal in nature before, but leading this project will give me a personal taste of the issues facing the disadvantaged today.
