Since 2004, we calculate that Ashanti Development has sent the equivalent of just under £3million to Ashanti in today’s prices. With this, we have given 70,000 people water, sanitation and hygiene training, as well as help with education, health and livelihoods. A little goes a long way in Ghana.
Worms can have serious health implications. Our team is back at it working hard to reduce these impacts. We work closely with District authorities to do so, the pictures show District health officers distributing 11,000 de-worming tablets to children. We’ve kept back another 6,000 to be distributed next term or reserved for very bad cases.
It’s the time of year again for our Annual Summer Party! If you are around please pop by and chat with us about the work we do and to celebrate just how far we’ve come. Hope to see you there!
Life is busy in Gyetiase village, where Ashanti people have been planting fruit trees round our headquarters building, not least to prevent erosion.
The photos show the result – watermelon, cocoyam and other plants are all doing well, while mango, avocado, guava and apple are planted on the other side of the building.
The single tree is a pawpaw, planted by some of our medics when they visited earlier this year.
Worms cause serious harm to Ashanti children, including discomfort, constipation, diarrhoea, malnutrition and mental dullness. Where the infection is gross, children develop huge protruding bellies that leave them hardly able to walk. They can lead to profound mental and physical retardation, and even death.
The photo shows Ashanti Development volunteer Belinda Ottu presenting 17,000 doses of de-worming tablets to the local authority health department for children under the age of twelve.
Ashanti Development is a 100 per cent volunteer-led charity in the UK, and pays no salaries or fees at all. That’s a big saving, and enables us to do far more than we could otherwise. Since we started, we have received just under £3 million in donations in real terms. With that, we’ve given nearly 50,000 people clean water, sanitation and training in health and hygiene. We’ve built six clinics, arranged for 1,000 cataract operations, set up farm support in over fifty villages, microcredit in over forty, built a big centre for the disabled, a new wing on Mampong Maternity Hospital – and a lot more beside.
We’re always happy to hear from people interested in joining us.
Ashanti Development has around thirty villages on its Farm Support project, with more to come next year. Everyone’s hoping that the weather will hold and that they’ll get a bumper crop. That includes Mr Dwormoh in the brown shirt, working hard at his maize farm.
In the blue shirt is Nana Yaw Adu. This year, for the first time in his life, he’s planted his maize in rows as he was taught during Farm Support training. Before, he would generally ‘broadcast’ it, that is, he would thrown handfuls of seeds onto the savannah and hope some of it would grow. If you’ve been a cocoa farmer all your life things like the usefulness of growing in rows aren’t immediately obvious.
African bees behave differently from UK bees. To become a bee-keeper you need to build a hive in an appropriate place, cross your fingers and hope the bees will like it enough to move in. The pictures are of bee keepers at Mantukwa village. They’ve made twenty hives which they hope the bees will like. So far eleven have been colonised.
Welcome back to our great friend and colleague, Ab Roy, who runs two SpecSavers shops in Leicester. Ab has given our clinic all the equipment you would expect to find in a UK SpecSavers shop, and – with a gap for the pandemic – each year he brings over a team to carry out a mass eye screening. The villages we work with are all big SpecSavers fans.
See our eye clinic in action below.
The Ghanaian Health Service has recently initiated a national emergency ambulance service. Our medics Chris and Helen met some of the local team, who were enthusiastic and currently responding to about one emergency call a week. Feedback was given that the team are underutilised, for example because people don’t understand that the ambulance is available for emergencies, but instead believe it exists to transport people who are already dead.
Chris Hartley-Sharpe, who used to work for London Ambulance, hopes that Ashanti Development may be able to provide them with support as their service develops.
