Setting the Stage

I was lucky enough to be given the four year plan for the district I will be working in. This document was written by the government of Ghana, upon consultation with local communities, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), and other districts. After working through the entire document (122 pages) I wanted to give you an update on what the current situation is and what I will be working on while I am there.

As you can see from the picture, Ghana is broken up into regions, and then into districts. I will be working in the Saboba/Chereponi District.

Population
Saboba is a rural district, with 110 000 people. The capital of the district, Saboba, has approximately 3700 people and this is where I will be living and working out of. 93% of the district's population lives in a rural setting, compounded with an extremely inadequate network of roads that become impassable during the rainy season. This results in complete isolation for the majority, especially when cell phone coverage doesn't reach mush further than town. Most of the people living in these rural establishments are subsistence farmers, meaning they only produce food for consumption, not for sale. Being rural they also lack access to electricity, and most use wood for cooking which contributes to higher respiratory illnesses among women.

Some of you may not be surprised as this is typically what most people think of when they think of "Africa". However, when I started to really think about what some of these numbers represented the reality of how difficult development can be for local governments really dawned on me.

97% of the population is rural, and most are subsistence farmers. How do you start to provide services to a population that doesn't pay taxes, and is completely cut off for half of the year during the rainy season? How does the government even start to generate revenues to pay its employees?

Demographic
In any society the most needy are children and elderly. They generate less for their society because they aren't working, and at that age they require many services. 46.2% of the population is under the age of 15. 54% of the people in the district are under 20. It's difficult to put that in perspective, but now we have half of the population being children, leaving a small working class to provide for society. Though deep down we know that children should be in school, these numbers provide an explanation for why kids are taken out of school to work. On average there are 5 children per woman.

Education
After reading those numbers, the public services provided to the people of Saboba did not come as a surprise, but is no more acceptable. 80% of men and 87.7% of women are illiterate. For every 55 students there is one primary school teacher and 56% of teachers in the district are not trained. In rural parts of the district there is no accommodation for the teachers and an absence of electricity, which deters educated teachers from taking posts in rural communities.

When I try to pinpoint a starting place, an entry point, a first step forward . . . I come up short. It is obvious that there is no ONE answer to this picture. That a multifaceted approach needs to be taken. Providing the infrastructure to link the isolated majority to the services available is crucial. Simultaneously, education cannot be forgotten, nor can the development of the agricultural sector which is the livelihood for at least 90% of the population. But when working within such a limited budget, choosing a starting place creates quite the conundrum.
(I've even omitted health care and water & sanitation from this picture, which I can assure you, are in a similar situation as the rest of the district's public services.)


I could go on but I don't want to simply write down a lot of stats without a reason. I not only want to provide some context for the challenges that the local government is pitted with, but also put development into perspective. Before I started to learn about the complexities of development, I had always wondered why with the billions of dollars poured into Africa annually and 30 years of aid were unable to "fix" these types of problems.

This is an oversimplified picture of the causes that explain the slow progress. I can assure you that there are many other factors at play. However let this be a start to understanding the local situation. Through my work you'll find out more about some of the challenges of development, and more importantly what is being done to address them.

All numbers and statistics were taken from the Saboba/Chereponi Medium-Term Development Plan (2006). For more information, please visit:
http://www.ghanadistricts.com/districts/