Kids Press Their Case: Effecting Community Empowerment through Citizen Journalism
The Dale Summer Fellowship allowed me the unique opportunity to initiate a program in youth empowerment and capacity building in Ashaiman, Ghana. Just one year ago, Ashaiman was given recognition as a municipality and was delegated new powers in local governance. This long-delayed change finally recognized that Ashaiman was not simply a suburb of Tema but instead a budding metropolis of 200,000+ people with its own unique challenges, especially in education, health, and safety.
Essentially a squatter settlement, Ashaiman was first settled in 1952 as construction started on the port in nearby Tema. Migrant workers who came for work in Tema set up shacks and makeshift homes in Ashaiman. However, there was no infrastructure plan in place for Ashaiman, and thus the city grew in an unchecked manner, with its population increasing from 2,624 in 1960 to 150,312 (according to the Ghana census report) or 217,717 (according to the Ashaiman Municipal Assembly – ASHMA) in 2000. In other words, in forty years, the population of Ashaiman grew 60 to 80-fold. Today, Ashaiman is still one of the fastest growing cities in Ghana. It is as diverse as it is large, with approximately 50 different ethnic groups from across Ghana and the rest of Africa taking residence in the city located 4km away from Tema and 30km away from Accra.
Unfortunately, with a lack of urban planning and infrastructure, education, health, and safety issues abound. Only one public high school, and only three private high schools, serve the city: there are fewer than 2,000 high school students in total in Ashaiman. This statistic highlights the shocking lack of access to education in Ashaiman and the city’s refusal to build more capacity in education. In terms of health care, extremely unsanitary conditions (e.g., liquid and solid human waste being disposed anywhere possible due to a lack of toilets in homes) cause high rates of malaria, yellow fever, diarrhea, etc. The proliferation of animals, from chickens and goats to cows—roaming the city’s muddy and unpaved streets—leave behind their own forms of waste.
And Ashaiman’s fearful crime statistics have earned it a reputation in Ghana. Many Ghanaians in Tema and Accra have never stepped foot in the area, for fear of being assaulted by armed robbers. However, in the past five years, change has slowly swept across the ignored city. Police are cracking down on criminals. Local banks and microfinance organizations have set up shop in Ashaiman, bringing many of Ashaiman’s residents into the modern financial world for the first time.
These gains, both in Ashaiman and in Ghana overall, will be short-lived unless educational opportunity is open to everyone. Without a solid foundation in English and good computer skills, the children of Ashaiman will be at a disadvantage in the new knowledge-based Ghanaian economy. Building on this premise, I launched an Engineers Without Borders project in Ashaiman (alongside fellow Dale awardee Jane Yang) to build a library and computer lab for a local school. This facility would also be open after school hours to members of the local community.
However, while EWB-Princeton’s project addresses concerns about education, I proposed an independent project with another focus—to start a newsletter to provide a voice to high school students in Ashaiman. Representative democracies are most successful when a local media outlet provides a check on local politicians and holds them accountable. This fact has caused some consternation in the United States, as local media outlets have closed in response to a downturn in the advertising market; the Detroit Free Press and Seattle Post Intelligencer, for example, have both shut down print operations. National media outlets, like the 24-hour news channels and large newspapers, are still relatively successful, but they cannot police at the local level. However, the United States has the advantage of an advanced internet infrastructure, and thus new forms of media are filling the gaps left by the old. Where one newspaper shuts down, multiple bloggers and Facebook groups popup to keep the local populace informed.
Ashaiman, then, suffers from a triple whammy. First, it lacks a local media outlet, whether in print or on TV. Second, it lacks the internet infrastructure to support the new age media which could fill in the gaps. Thirdly, Ashaiman suffers from a history of corruption and poor governance, exactly the things that local media would root out. To accentuate this third point, the Bradt Ghana Travel Guide indicates that the Ghanaian government years ago made funding available to pave all the roads in Ashaiman—yet only two roads were ever paved, and both are pockmarked with potholes at that.
My first step in Ghana was to find an on-the-ground facilitator. I had no idea where to secure paper or find a printing shop; moreover, had I tried to find these on my own, I would have been charged through the nose. As a foreigner with little grasp of the local language, I would also be looked at with some unease by the very high school students who I sought to attract to this venture. I found the perfect facilitator in Sefa Awaworyi. Sefa is a fellow math major at Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST). He had attended the Evangelical Presbyterian Basic School—the school where EWB-Princeton is constructing a library—when he was younger, and he is the head of the EP Church’s Youth Ministry. He already produces a newsletter for the Church, and he was more than eager to help on this project.
We paid upfront for 13 editions of our newsletter, titled the Star Voice. This let us lock in a low price and avoid the prospect of future inflation. We also bought paper in bulk for 13 editions. We next visited the offices of the Ghana Education Service (GES) in Tema; the GES is the federal bureaucracy that runs Ghana’s public schools, including those in Ashaiman. The deputy director of the Tema branch of the GES is Mrs. Baltes, the wife of an EP Church pastor and a good friend of Sefa’s family. She was immediately brought on board with the project, and she communicated to the Ashaiman high school administration that they should notify students of our newsletter and distribute copies of the paper.
I should make a side point here—I believe that the success of the paper hinged on the fact I came to be accepted as a member of the community. By working closely with the EP Church, I came to be identified with the Church and was therefore viewed less of as a foreigner. The Church also opened doors in the Ghanaian bureaucracy (as with Mrs. Baltes) and immediately lent credibility to my project—I wasn’t here on the behest of a transient NGO but with a centuries-old church. Churches were the first NGO’s in the world, and they continue to serve the social welfare. Even though I am not a Christian, I was welcomed with open arms as a member of the congregation, and the Church lent all the help it could to my projects.
The next challenge we had was to drum up some publicity for our paper. In the classic chicken-and-egg problem, there would be no newspaper without contributing articles, but no one would contribute to a newspaper which they haven’t seen or heard of before. To cut through this problem, Sefa and I decided to produce three editions of the paper in quick order, one each week for three weeks. He, I, and a few of his friends would write the articles for these first editions and then distribute them to high school students in Ashaiman. You can find copies of the Star Voice online at http://mohitagrawal.wordpress.com.
We are now printing on a more relaxed schedule, one edition per month. We have collected the articles for the fourth paper, and it will go to press soon. A challenge that we faced was that high schools were on vacation through the month of August, and thus we found it difficult to motivate students to write during that time. Now that school is back in session, articles are more forthcoming and more editions of the newsletter will be coming out.
I will be traveling back to Ghana next summer in order to finish up the EWB project. I expect that the next 10 editions of the Star Voice will have come out by that time. I will apply for further funding through grants and other sources here in the United States, and Sefa is working on securing funding in Ghana. Even if these funding sources fall through, a year’s worth of newsletters will have served as an outlet for youth and serve to inform the public. As a further project, I am contemplating mixing in an aspect of social networking with the newsletter—while the newsletter comes out once a month, perhaps text messages can be sent weekly with news pertinent to youth. This service, similar to Twitter, would bring new media to bear in Ghana.
Overall, my experience in Ghana was fantastic. Whether as a guest at a lavish funeral or at a wedding, to seeing the eyes of young students at EP Basic open in utter surprise as they saw the 1000+ books in their new library, my time in Ghana was well-spent and fruitful. I would like to extend my deepest thanks to the Dale family for allowing me to have this amazing experience and to do a little bit of good in the world.
