Projects in Ghana

Agriculture

The main goal of the Agriculture project is for smallholder farm households to achieve food and nutrition security, sustainable livelihoods, and increased resilience. The Agriculture project has 3 key objectives:

1. Strengthen smallholder farmers’ capacity to improve the diversity, productivity and/or sustainability of their agricultural production.
2. Increase smallholder farmers’ capacity to generate agriculture-related income, and
3. Increase the capacity of women of reproductive age (WRA) and/or key household decision makers to increase the dietary diversity of households.

Volunteers collaborate with community leaders to identify community needs and implement appropriate interventions. Volunteers are a catalyst for a wide range of activities, which may include:

• Increase food security by working with smallholder farmers to improve crop production and storage of harvested products, and add value to agricultural products.
• Co-train farmers on ways to increase small-scale animal husbandry.
• Work with partners and women of reproductive age to improve household nutrition.
• Co-train farmers on record keeping and village savings and loans associations (VSLAs).

Cutting across the three objective areas, Agricultural Volunteers incorporate engagement of women and youth in all aspects of their project’s implementation. Volunteers and their local counterparts involve women and youth in programs emphasizing literacy, numeracy, agriculture, nutrition, business knowledge, and skills development.

Education

The goal of the Education project is for students to gain skills in math, science, and art in order to advance in their academic careers. Volunteers in the Education sector work collaboratively with counterparts and the communities to increase:

• student achievement in STEAM (science, math, and/or art)
• student literacy
• community members' ability to support students’ access to learning
• teachers' capacity to empower girls in the classroom

Volunteers will fill a critical educational gap in rural and urban schools. Peace Corps Volunteers teach alongside teachers in rural communities to provide essential skills in math and science for mainstream junior high schools and schools for the deaf. They learn how to integrate literacy learning into math and science lessons to support English literacy skills development that helps bring students up to grade level. The Education sector partners with organizations to implement STEAM projects in the communities Volunteers serve.

Health

The goal of the Health project is to support national efforts to ensure that members of communities in Ghana lead healthier lives through improved health practices. Peace Corps Ghana has three objectives under the Health project:

1. Increase the knowledge and skills of community members to improve water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) practices and reduce diarrheal diseases.
2. Increase the knowledge and skills of youth to improve their health and well-being through health and life skills education.
3. Increase the knowledge and skills of women and caregivers to adopt practices that contribute to healthy pregnancies and healthy newborns and children under five.

The focus of this project is to work with community members—children, youth (up to age 19), women, men, caregivers of children under five, pregnant women and lactating mothers—to improve WASH practices, and their health and well-being.

Peace Corps Ghana has both semi-structured projects involving international and local partners, as well as postings where Volunteers are expected to work solely in their community with relatively little structured support. Both settings provide exciting opportunities for Volunteers to promote positive behavioral changes in support of the three objectives of the Health project. Action planning, implementation and capacity strengthening form the foundation of the project’s rural health outreach.