AUR’s development work in Ghana has been rewarded by a grant from the Latium Regional Government. AUR has been working with partners in Ghana on various projects since 2004. Last year we applied for funds from our regional government (Regione Lazio) which recognized the value of our ongoing work and the projects themselves by awarding us €25,000.
Our partners in Ghana are the Cape Coast School for the Deaf, the Cape Coast NGO, DASFA (Development Aid for School Farms) and the Kokrobitey Institute, and in Rome we are working with the University of Rome La Sapienza.
Early results. The 2008 group in front of the chicken unit built with AUR fundraisers the previous year.
“Sustaining Education – Educating for Sustainabilty”
The project was planned and drawn up by Gabriella D’Amico who was on the 2007 January program and since then has coordinated AUR’s Africa Program. It has two elements both of which build on AUR’s mission and vocation for education and both of which aim to be ongoing and sustainable after the initial project.
The first supports the Cape Coast School for the Deaf’s school farm. This is a farm run by the schoolchildren under supervision of a professional manager, Mershack Bentil. They have the expert advice of Cape Coast University agronomist, Prof. Joe Kwarteng and his NGO, DASFA. The farm’s aim is to provide food for the school canteen, budget support by selling produce and education for the students who will have extra skills when they graduate. This is especially important for handicapped children whose opportunities on the job market is limited with respect to fully able bodied students. It also creates a culture of sustainable agriculture essential in the developing and developed world alike.
The second works with our longtime partner in Ghana, the Kokrobitey Institute. Its director, Renée Neblett has set up a workshop which makes fashion and utility products from recycled material. She has made shopping bags from used flour sacks for use in Ghana – these do not just recycle the sacks they mean fewer black plastic bags used in markets; she has used her design skills to produce up market handbags from recycled advertisement hoardings for sale in the US. AUR’s Regione Lazio project supports the KI’s latest plan to make school bags for Ghanaian children using the same material. It combines waste management with teaching craft and management skills along with job and wealth creation for the village. One of the participants in the January program, Lauren Hankey, returned to the KI as in intern to continue working on the project.
In January as the project got under way, we were accompanied by journalist Anna Maria Giordano from the Italian public broadcaster RAI’s flagship foreign affairs program“Radio Tre Mondo”. She made an hour long documentary “Ghana, viaggio in un paese laboratorio” on the project and AUR’s Ghana program.
Planning the project 2011. The AUR group working with Barbara Ennin (Principal CCSD), Ida Kwarteng (DASFA) and Mershack Bentil (School Farm Manager), Anna Maria Giordano (RAI).
Our Partners
In Ghana, we have worked for almost a decade with the Kokrobitey Institute which has hosted the January Program since 2004. Each year we have carried out small scale community work in the village.
Our first visit to the Cape Coast School for the Deaf was also in 2004 and each year we have gone back sometimes doing small jobs during the visit, sometimes fundraising in Italy for additions to the school farm
Development Aid for School Farms Association is a Cape Coast NGO headed by Prof. Joe Kwarteng which has a long experience in providing the necessary skills to set up viable units in school farms.
For the “Regione Lazio” project, we are also working with a Roman partner, the University of Rome “La Sapienza” Eurosapienza center in the Department of Economics. AUR and Eurosapienza have many years experience of working together. We have taken their interns on the January Ghana progam and one of their masters graduates, Gabriella D’Amico has worked as AUR’s Africa Progam coordinator since 2007. There have been exchanges of faculty for some years and common seminars for students but this is the first time that we are working together on a development project.
Teaching at the KI. Samia Nkrumah, member of the Ghanaian Parliament who lectures at the KI and Prof. James Walston (AUR).
AUR’s Development Project
“Sustaining education – educating for sustainability” is part of AUR’s larger ongoing development project focussing on Ghana but involving other issues and places.
Since 2004, Prof. Walston has been taking students to the Kokrobitey Institute in Janaury. More than a hundred students from AUR, Ghanaian universities (Legon and Ashesi) other universities in Rome (Sapienza, John Cabot) and the US have taken the two week course. They concentrate on democracy and institution-building, history (the Atlantic slave trade, colonialism and independence), international relations in Africa, development economy in a mix of formal seminars, field trips, meetings with experts and informal meetings with Ghanaians.
The “Regione Lazio” project uses and builds on this experience in education and sustainability.
The January courses very soon produced a flow in the opposite direction with a Ghanaian student coming to Rome for a semester scholarship. The scholarship is offered by AUR and supported by faculty and alumni who have taken part in the courses.
As part of AUR’s mission, there have been conferences on African and development issues as well as specifically Roman and Italian issues involving immigration and racism. There have been a number of conferences organized by Profs. Isabella Clough, Bjørn Thomassen and James Walston which have also led to academic publications. The conferences bring together our own students and faculty with foreign and Italian academics, diplomats, journalists and operators in the various fields. The Department also works with foreign embassies working on these issues and Jame Walston and Gabriella D’Amico were elected to the City of Rome’s “Comitato Cittadino per la Cooperazione Decentrata”, the council’s committee which looks after development issues. As part of the work with the CCCD, we present our work and that of city NGOs in schools and public libraries in Rome.
The foreign cooperation work is not just in development and politics. AUR has also been awarded grants from the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs for work on archæology and cultural heritage in Ghana. Here our partners are UPTER in Rome and Legon’s Department of Archæology. Two Ghanaian faculty members Prof. Kodjo Gavua and Dr. William Gblerkpoor will be presenting papers at the AUR-British School in Rome conference on cultural heritage in November.
There is also ongoing research on transnational organized crime in which AUR’s James Walston is working with Kwesi Aning from the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre in Accra and Antonio Vazquez of the Real Instituto Elcano in Madrid on organized crime links between the Mediterranean and West Africa.
Planning the project 2011. The AUR group working with Renée Neblett (Director, KI).
Development Funding in Italy
The grant was awarded to the AUR by the regional government (there are 20 regions in Italy and they roughly correspond to states in the US). As elsewhere, the bulk of Italy’s overseas aid goes through central government but an increasing amount is part of the so‐called “decentralized cooperation” in which lower levels of government (regions, provinces, cities) fund smaller scale development projects put forward by NGOs and educational institutes like AUR.
Overall, these projects are a significant part of Italy’s overseas development aid. This is also why AUR is a member of the Rome City Council’s “Comitato Cittadino per la Cooperazione Decentrata”, the committee where Rome NGOs, volunteer associations, universities and the city council meet and decide on Rome’s development policy.
These are “matched funds” in which the donor, in this case the “Regione Lazio” gives money for a project and we have to match the sum.
For more information on this project contact Prof. James Walston: j.walston@aur.edu
