Author: Penny

We recently built a school for Esereso village, as the school the community built themselves blew away in a storm. The school we built was much larger as we knew that as soon as term started more children would come out of the bush and enroll. But we’ve only now managed to raise funds for desks for the children, who used to sit on the floor during lessons.

We’re looking for medical staff who’d like to volunteer in Mampong Government Hospital for, say, 2 weeks to 6 months. They’ll have to pay their own fares and vaccinations, but Ashanti Development will provide free board, lodging, washing, internet and transport to and from work.
There are 98 beds in the hospital’s general wing and a further 56 elsewhere. Treatable conditions such as malaria are by far the highest cause of admission to the general wing, followed by anaemia, pneumonia, diarrhoea, typhoid, hypertension and diabetes. There’s a big maternity wing too.
Please tell anyone you think might be interested, and here’s a photo of the hospital.

We already showed you some of the things we’re making in Ashanti and selling in the UK. We’re new to this sort of thing, and decided not to sell on-line this Christmas, but to use stalls in street markets.  Now many Christmas markets are being cancelled, so we wondered whether any of our friends on Facebook might be interested in buying. 

We have things such as duvet covers and pillowcase sets, ties, tote bags, fans, cushion covers, hats, oven gloves. They are made by the students in our dressmaking school.  Here’s the price list:  Aprons small £8, large £12; Bags, small £8, larger Tote Bags £12; Duvet covers & pillow sets £45, scrunchies (for hair holding) £5; Ties £10; Fans £20; Sun Hats £20; Cushion Covers £10.

Email your order to [email protected] and we’ll send it off as soon as we can.  You can pay via the DONATE button on our website at www.ashantidevelopment.org, or we’ll tell you where to send a cheque or a bank transfer

After a being closed for a long time because of covid19, our eye clinic recently opened to long queues of patients. We’ve no money for cataract operations right now (we’re saving up) but Agnes, our optometrist, gave a lot of people better sight through prescription spectacles. Here are photos of just some of them. They look pretty happy about their specs.

Sorry for the silence. We’ve been busy doing housekeeping stuff including taking on a new  recruit to help with next year’s farming. This is going to be fantastic. Our farm support project will cover thirty villages for four years and during that time farmers in the thirty communities will get farm training and loans to buy quality farm inputs.

And because they pay back the loan with interest each year after harvest, and each spring we lend them what they’ve just paid back (ie loan plus interest), the loan fund keeps its value in real terms and is ready for us to lend out in the new villages.

Farmers who go through our farm support scheme say their harvest doubles or trebles in size in just one year, and after four it is much much bigger. We’re hoping this project will have a big impact on hunger across the whole area. The picture shows farmers receiving their loans before planting