Akwaaba; message in english!

Dear friends,

Only 5 more days and then I’ll fly to Ghana, the country that I started to love so much when I worked with UNICEF for my internship. I long for the always smiling and happy faces, the clear milky way, the sound of cracking speakers with a too high volume with Westlife and the smell of a rain shower in the heat.

I will join a research project of Resilience (company of 3 Wageningen friends) and Hans Eenhoorn, professor at Wageningen University and a member of the UN task force on hunger. Together with a group of students I will search for the possibilities to change smallholder farmers in Ghana into entrepreneurs. I will look especially at the Ghana School Feeding Programme, an initiative of the Dutch and Ghanaian Government in order to increase school enrolment and short term food security. Through school meals the programme hopes that more children enroll in school and that children will have higher results in school because of better nutrition. The school enrolment increased a lot because of the programme, but the quality of education is questionable because of classes with more children and teachers without proper training. Food for GSFP is according to the glossy brochures all produced locally. However, in practice this is not true. I will find out which efforts have been taken to involve farmers and how to improve their involvement. To o this research I will go to Bonsaaso, a small village between Kumasi and Tamale. This tiny African village thanks its 518 google hits to the fact that it is one of the Millennium Villages; the UN playground where people don’t use their bed nets to fish and where the Millennium Development Goals should be realized in 2015. The proud of Kofi Annan and Jeffrey Sachs. I am very curious!

Now I am busy with the preparations. First of all, I have to reinstall my computer that crashed totally! Furthermore, I am finishing the long shopping list of my Ghanaian friends and try to make contact with the coordinators in Ghana because I have no idea how to reach the villae, where I will sleep and whether I will have the permission of Columbia University to go to Bonsaaso. But as long as that is not arranged I will find a nice place at Labadi Beach. Perfect isn’t?

Warm regards, Leonoor