By Alvaro Varela, Semester at Sea, Spring 2017
Global Mamas is a nonprofit and fair trade organization empowering African women.They sell different types of products made by local African women and in many cases using renewable materials. They make kitchen accessories, personal care products, bracelets and necklaces and different kind of clothing.It really makes the customer feel like they are making a difference because by purchasing their products they are offering sustainable livelihoods to African women.
In 2003, six Ghanaian women who wanted to use their talent as bikers and seamstresses to earn money to support their families met two North American women who wanted to help them achieve their vision. Check out the website to learn more about the organization vision, mission, products and more!
http://www.globalmamas.org/Info/founders#
See a video on the history and impact of Global Mamas... a true success story!
By Sami Elkan, Semester at Sea, Spring 2017
After what felt like an endless bus ride of 10 hours, we finally stepped off and were greeted by the Senase Village in Ghana. Fred, one of the most inspiration people I had ever met, was in charge of our IMPACT trip.
Long-story-short, Fred grew up in Senase, excelled in school, and his parents spent all they had to put Fred through school. They could not afford to send him to college, so he moved to Accra where his father lived and planned to work and put himself through the University of Accra. Living with his father didn’t work out, so he sold bracelets in the street, similar to all the people who walk around Accra selling items that they carried in a basket on their heads. One day, a group of tourists asked Fred where they should eat lunch, so he dropped his things and took them to local favorite, he showed them around the rest of Ghana, and they had an AMAZING time. That group of tourists was from Semester At Sea. They took his number down, and for the next four days, Fred gave tours to Semester At Sea students, with no time to sleep. This happened again the next year, and then he later decided to create his own tour company, which was always 100% booked with SASers when they came to Ghana. Around this time, Fred had a vision to open a school in his village because he had seen the public Ghanaian education system fail too many people. After making closer and closer ties with Semester At Sea, he was eventually invited to go on Semester At Sea where he spread his vision throughout the ship. He later attended the University of San Diego and received a $25,000 grant from there to make his vision become a reality. The grant along with generous donations helped him open the Semanhyiya American School in Senase three years ago.
My fellow SASers and me taught at the school on the 2nd day in Ghana. I worked in the nursery school with two to three year olds. The day consisted of us singing and dancing to songs in English that helped them learn colors, numbers, days of the week, how to cross the road, and how to treat others respectfully and then we took breaks every thirty minutes or so. I was really impressed by the level of knowledge these children possessed at such young ages. The school’s philosophy is based on active, interactional, experiential learning.
On the 3rd day, we painted numbers and the alphabet on their recess area. We also repainted their lunch benches, the basketball lines, and other outside fixtures. Even though it was well over 100 degrees, no one complained because we were all so moved by Fred’s story and the kids’ enthusiasm for learning to make a difference.
Meeting Fred mad me realize the importance of giving back to your own community. Throughout Semester At Sea, we have all participated in many social and sustainable ventures for strangers, which is amazing, but we need to also think about the value in giving back to the communities that made it possible for us to attend Semester At Sea. After working at the Semanhyiya American School, I feel an urgency to give back to my community. I made a promise to myself that this summer; I am going to volunteer in my hometown, something I
By Madison Moore, Semester at Sea, Spring 2017
Ghana. I don’t know where to start. I could ramble on and on about this beautiful country. There was so much to see and so much to experience. I had the opportunity to visit an organization that is not only a non-profit organization, but a social entrepreneurship.
The Global Sustainable Aid Project (GSAP) strives for a new kind of aid: aid that is sustainable, collaborative, and innovative. They aim “to create programs that foster empowerment, education, and self-sufficiency”. They train individuals for free who are called “Makers” and inform them on how to create toilets. The Makers then sell these toilets to the people in the villages, so they can reduce the amount of bodily fluids or waste that is being released.
The individuals in these villages tend to do their business on the side of the shore and bushes/grass. This has been causing a health risk because some of the feces have worms in them and are causing diseases that are spreading. So, GSAP has created these micro-flush toilets that are to be installed in the houses to encourage the people of the village to use them. It was an interesting presentation. As we left we noticed that a little boy was urinating in the grass after we just saw a very nice toilet that was walking distance away. How could one advertise a toilet, so the people will use it instead of doing their business on the grass?
Learn more about this project from this GSAP video and website.
Video
Website
http://www.globalsustainableaid.org/gsap-microflush-toilets/
By Grace Kelly, Semester at Sea, Spring 2017
When one makes a monetary donation to a developing country, helps build a school, or joins an organization like Teach for America, it’s done with the intention that these actions are helping to improve the situations in developing countries. But are they really making an impact?
Innovations for Poverty Action, an American non-profit research organization with 51 locations worldwide, seeks to address that question. IPA’s location in Ghana is one of the largest in the world, and I was lucky enough to meet one of IPA’s Research Coordinators, Kym Cole (who is a Semester at Sea alum!), as part of my Economic Development field class.
Using randomized control trials (RCTs) to eliminate bias, IPA measures the impact of development policy in a variety of sectors: education, healthcare, agriculture, and microfinance to name a few. RCTs are a lengthy, painstaking process, requiring months and sometimes years of research.
Ghana has a literacy rate of 71% and schools struggle with student and teacher absenteeism, lack of teaching aides, lack of teacher time spent on task, and large classrooms (around 50 students to 1 teacher). Kym showed us an example of a recent research project to determine the effectiveness of a variety of initiatives to improve education outcomes. They had one control group where no intervention was used and four other groups that received interventions: remedial education during school hours, remedial education after school hours, splitting up the classes for more focused review, and training the teachers in better techniques.
IPA measured their results through oral and written tests and surveys that were distributed amongst teachers, parents, students, and the local community. The results showed a non-improving situation for the control group, with scores actually getting lower in some cases, a concerning finding. The positive effects of all four interventions was driven mostly by improvements in literacy, with remedial after-school classes being the most effective. However, the research found that there were no significant impacts on teacher on-task time or absenteeism from these policies. This suggests that supervision or systemic changes need to still occur. After having discussed the role of education in economic development throughout the semester, it was fascinating to see its tangible impacts in the real world. Have you ever tried to make an impact in another country, and if so, do you think it actually made a positive difference?
By Grace Kelly, Semester at Sea, Spring 2017
When one makes a monetary donation to a developing country, helps build a school, or joins an organization like Teach for America, it’s done with the intention that these actions are helping to improve the situations in developing countries. But are they really making an impact?
Innovations for Poverty Action, an American non-profit research organization with 51 locations worldwide, seeks to address that question. IPA’s location in Ghana is one of the largest in the world, and I was lucky enough to meet one of IPA’s Research Coordinators, Kym Cole (who is a Semester at Sea alum!), as part of my Economic Development field class.
Using randomized control trials (RCTs) to eliminate bias, IPA measures the impact of development policy in a variety of sectors: education, healthcare, agriculture, and microfinance to name a few. RCTs are a lengthy, painstaking process, requiring months and sometimes years of research.
Ghana has a literacy rate of 71% and schools struggle with student and teacher absenteeism, lack of teaching aides, lack of teacher time spent on task, and large classrooms (around 50 students to 1 teacher). Kym showed us an example of a recent research project to determine the effectiveness of a variety of initiatives to improve education outcomes. They had one control group where no intervention was used and four other groups that received interventions: remedial education during school hours, remedial education after school hours, splitting up the classes for more focused review, and training the teachers in better techniques.
IPA measured their results through oral and written tests and surveys that were distributed amongst teachers, parents, students, and the local community. The results showed a non-improving situation for the control group, with scores actually getting lower in some cases, a concerning finding. The positive effects of all four interventions was driven mostly by improvements in literacy, with remedial after-school classes being the most effective. However, the research found that there were no significant impacts on teacher on-task time or absenteeism from these policies. This suggests that supervision or systemic changes need to still occur. After having discussed the role of education in economic development throughout the semester, it was fascinating to see its tangible impacts in the real world. Have you ever tried to make an impact in another country, and if so, do you think it actually made a positive difference?
By Justin Eichenberger, Semester at Sea, Spring 2017
When Dutch investigative Reporter Teun “Tony” van de Keuken first embarked on his investigation of the cocoa industry 11 years ago, he had no idea he was about to walk into one of the largest modern slave markets in the world. Worse yet, he discovered that it was most commonly young children who were enslaved in this process. Disgusted, Teun sprang into action: he ate a few chocolate bars from the world’s major producers, and then turned himself into the police, as, by the same principle surrounding receipt of stolen goods, he was complicit in slavery.
Despite his best efforts, the public prosecutor refused to prosecute him. However, while awaiting that decision, Teun went ahead and made 5,000 Fairtrade chocolate bars for distribution. Thus, Tony’s Chocolonely was born. Committed to “100% slave-free chocolate”, Tony’s has been pushing since 2005 to reach achieve absolute equality in the industry. Now partnered with multiple farm co-ops in Ghana, Tony’s is providing fair wages (25% above the industry standard) to more than 1,800 Ghanaian farmers.
One of the co-ops, ABOCFA, is an especially rare case. Of all of the cocoa production in Ghana, only 3% is Fairtrade certified, and only 1% is organic. ABOCFA falls within the very small intersection of these two statistics, which is why they stood out to Tony’s, and have emerged as one of their leading providers. Tony’s fight is far from over, but if they keep changing the expectation of what is “normal” in the chocolate industry and continue to educate the public about the atrocities in the current market, perhaps we really can achieve 100% slave-free chocolate.
