Friday 9 October 2015

Surveying Sandema

Blog entry 1 by Lydia

As the news informed me this morning, Ghana is a country struggling with registering its population. There is no official or enforced system of identity cards, no national structure for registering births or deaths, many of the homes do not have addresses, all of which ultimately contribute to problems with the voters’ register. A bumper sticker the other day sums up this issue: vote early, vote once, vote peacefully. Although the idea that you could vote more than once is alien to the political apathy that has seeped into British culture, it is something our Ghanaian counterparts seemed to joke off as a normal problem in their electoral system.
Image result for vote once vote early vote peacefully

This national problem of registering the population has local consequences for our LIFE project (Local Integration For Empowerment), as we have no access to a register of people, and in particular children, living with disabilities in the community. So our first plan of action has been to undertake active field research to try and find those who are unknown to our partner project, CBR (Community Based Rehabilitation) or the local DPOs (Disabled People’s Organisations).

Before my arrival (I rocked up a bit late due to a coup in Burkina Faso which redirected my voluntary work to this fantastic project here in Ghana) the team has designed a questionnaire, and the plan was to go door to door asking everyone these questions and hopefully reveal people living with disabilities who were normally kept in their homes through a culture which still judges disability as a stigmatisation, a shame that should be kept private. At the end of the day, that attitude was prevalent in the UK even just 60 years ago, and is still being improved upon.

We first went to Wiaga, a neighbouring village where previous cohorts had established a successful girls’ club which even runs whilst volunteers are not here, the aim of all our projects is to establish sustainability so this is fantastic for us. We began by meeting the local DPO, who then were helpful in taking us to homes of people they knew who have disabilities. However, this wasn’t the exact purpose of our research, but we made the decision to prioritise not damaging the relationship with the DPO, who were quite offended that we wanted to talk to people they were not aware of. I remained with the DPO leaders, and as such was introduced to a variety of families who often had an elderly disabled person within their midst, but I didn’t meet any children with disabilities. That was only my personal experience, but the group as a whole actually made contact with around ten CWDs (children with disabilities) in the Wiaga community, which resulted in the first girls’ club of this cohort featuring three people with disabilities attending, but that will have its own blog post up soon!

We also undertook to survey Sandema, which our local in-country volunteer Victoria divided into six communities for us to take as pairs. We elected not to directly involve the DPO in our search of Sandema for CWDs and PWDs, because of the way our results had been strongly influenced in Wiaga. Each working pair, eg Abdullah and I, took one community, and also used the opportunity to drop off a questionnaire to the local schools’ head-teachers.



The community I visited was called Fiisa, and it was incredibly rural. I’m from Devon, but this was a whole other level. We cycled through maize fields, along the edges of fields planted with low growing crops or rice fields on paths that were the thickness of the bicycle tire. We crossed rivers and waded through marshy sections where I was up to my knees in water, squelch squelch mud. I was slightly worried about snakes in the long grass, but the worst thing that bit me was an ant so no worries there!


This data collection has been two very laborious days out in the heat, and we often came across language barriers where not accompanied by Buli speakers (the local language), but it is a fantastic achievement to have discovered people living in these communities with disabilities who we can now hope to incorporate in our projects.


We are feeling energetic and hopeful about our work, and looking forward to processing all this data to reveal our results!