Receiving Knowledge: A Key Component for Development

By Pareisse Wilson & Baba Iddrisu Issahaku

We are a third of the way into our time here in Savelugu! For us to be able to work in a sustainable way in our respective communities, it is vital that we first fully understand the needs of the communities, their own capabilities, and then we are able to undertake the appropriate actions to work together. We have been very busy making sure that we understand the needs of our communities, and we have put that into action this week by learning a great deal! 

Pareisse: To understand the needs of our communities, we first looked at our recommendations from the previous cohort, before undertaking baseline research last week. My counterpart (Francis) and I are always very warmly welcomed into our community, Balshei; I’ve been named Amina and Francis has been called Abu. So we usually step out of the taxi and are warmly welcomed by the women of our IGG with big hugs, laughter, and greetings in

Fuseina translating our Baseline survey for our community!

Dagbani. Most of our IGG members speak Dagbani, and so it was very important that we include our NFED supervisor, Fuseina, who could assist us in translation. We were able to fully understand the needs of the women we work with, and were able to carry this forward to discuss with the team so that we can tailor our training and awareness raising sessions for our communities. This by far was the most important session that we have had with our community. In order for development to really work, it has to come from a grassroots level where we truly listen to the voices of the people we are working with.

Baba: Following the baseline research conducted by us in Sahakpalugu we discovered that our IGG lack adequate financial capital to improve their business, their packaging skills are limited, they do not currently have a bank account and are therefore not

Baba in Sahakpalugu, working on the baseline survey with the IGG

registered as a cooperative. Despite these issues that they face, the group have the zeal to learn more about how to improve their lives and better the future of their families. We are here to facilitate the necessary training within these communities so that they can achieve their goals.

Both: 

The baseline completed and the needs assessed, we know now what our communities want as well as their abilities to achieve these goals. Next step: undertaking training alongside members of our communities so that we can approach the next few weeks with knowledge and understanding.  Knowing there was important work to be done this week, all of us volunteers have worked well and cooperated better than before!  So we made all of the necessary arrangements and contacted experts to

Team NFED hard at work in the office, sourcing contacts for training

train us on: cooperatives, financial management, marketing and managing group dynamics. All of the contacts we made were endlessly capable, and were more flexible and willing to help than we first assumed. We were all extremely grateful for their assistance.

The week was full with our busy training sessions and we now feel that we have the necessary knowledge and understanding to work successfully in our communities. We especially enjoyed the training session on cooperatives, as this forms a large part of our project goals.  All of the sessions were extremely useful and now we have the daunting, but achievable task of turning this information into a viable format that we can share with our IGGs.. We can’t wait to see what next week will bring, it’s going to be an amazing week: putting the knowledge that we have learned into action with our communities!

Baba and Pareisse xx

Nearing the end of our great training on cooperatives. One of our NFED partner staff, Mr Jafaru, shared with us the importance of cooperation!