Over one child in ten is severely malnourished and will probably suffer damage to long-term health.
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When we first starting working in the Ashanti Region our intention was simply to provide villages with clean water, to train them in health and hygiene, and then to move on. However, we soon realised that villages as poor as these could not be expected, on the basis of a supply of clean water alone, to pull themselves out of poverty.
For as long as they could remember, many villagers had spent most of their waking hours fetching water, and had lost their traditional skills in the process. Most of them were hungry most of the time, particularly the children. For the last two years, we have taken doctors out to the Ashanti Region to assess health needs. They found that eleven per cent of the children were severely malnourished to the detriment of their long-term health. The rest were simply malnourished. A child of ten or eleven in Ashanti is often about the size and weight of a four year old in London. Worse still, many of the women had been forced by poverty to work as prostitutes, and HIV/Aids was rife.
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Few people move in or out of the village, so we decided to pump a little money into the local economy in the hope of kick-starting the development process. In Gyetiase, our first village, for example:
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We made a bargain with the local authority that if we provided free school meals for the youngest children for five years, they would take on this responsibility thereafter. We built a kitchen, hired two cooks, and from January 2007 provided free school meals for the youngest ninety children registered in the primary school. A month later, registrations had doubled and the children already looked healthier.
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We set up a woodcarving school and apprenticeship scheme, since woodcarving was the villagers' occupation of choice. Today, we sell their carvings in the UK.
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We persuaded a local chief to let us farm his tribal land for ten years free of charge. We plan to introduce microcredits very soon, so the men can buy tools and seed to work the land. We will also buy a cassava-grinding machine, so the women can trade their produce in nearby villages.
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We are also planning to rebuild one school and refurbish two others, providing all three with latrines and handwashing facilities. Again, the villagers will carry out the manual work free of charge.
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We collected, graded and distributed hundreds of second-hand spectacles, particularly important to a community whose eye sight has been damaged by cataracts, long-term infection, malnutrition and spitting snakes.
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