Things the future brings
This morning I met with my boss, Franciska Issaka, founding director of Centre for Sustainable Development Initiatives (CENSUDI), to discuss my work in Bolgatonga, in the Upper East region of Ghana.
CENSUDI is a local Ghanaian NGO that has been working with gender issues in Ghana for the last 11 years. They have five focuses in terms of gender: they encourage women in decision making (WODEM, including voter education and mobilization of women in politics), they have an education improvement programme (a scholarship for underpriviged women, though 25% of the scholarships also go to young men), poverty reduction (through microcredit schemes, a sustainable land tenure project and a comunity-based land management system), gender mainstreaming (capacity-building with institutions mainstreaming the idea of gender into their functions), and domestic violence and victim support work.
In each of these five areas CENSUDI has been organizing workshops and symposiums training other NGOs in gender procedures, helping them effectively incorporate gender considerations into their mandates. The problem right now is that despite their effectiveness in training other organizations they have no documentation or easily accessible training materials. Which is where I come in. My job, starting in January, is to collect their resources and organize them into straightforward, practical manuals for the gender issues CENSUDI and other NGOs deal with on a regular basis. The goal of this is threefold: primarily this will provide easy access to effective gender-training information to organizations working in this field. However, it will also provide documentation of the work done by CENSUDI in the last ten years in terms of their training capacities, and will hopefully also provide a basis for fundraising as the manuals are sold. So there you go, that’s what I’m doing in Ghana.
To quote the Constantines: “Soon enough work and love will make a man out of you.” Hah. Let’s hope not.