How do you help girls in Ghana escape poverty? You listen.
The smells smack us, first fish, then cooking stews, urine, smoldering trash, one after another. Music blares and people shout “obrini!” – “white lady!” – as our all-female team of Rotary volunteers walks through. We scramble on roads swallowed whole by potholes, edge single-file through alleyways between shacks, duck under clotheslines, skirt past clothing heaped in mounds and by vendors selling a rainbow of fruits and vegetables, yellow and red peppers, yams, plantains. The staccato rhythm of someone pounding fufu, a staple dish in Africa, acts as the heartbeat of this slum alongside the railways in central Accra, Ghana.
A village girl will step off a train into these frenzied streets to start a new life, trying to escape a forced marriage, a broken home, or a future in rural poverty. Without the career skills required for a well-paying job, she’ll join the cacophony, working as one of the kayayei – female porters who carry goods on their heads – or as a vendor peddling gum, candy, water, towels, mosquito nets, batteries, flip-flops. (“It’s like a Walmart on the streets,” one of the volunteers comments.) Whatever money she earns will go toward food, a shower, and a safe place to sleep, not to the stable home she had once imagined. She won’t be alone: A 2012 census estimated that more than 60,000 people under 18 live or work on the streets of Accra.
If she’s lucky, when she arrives in the city, she’ll encounter someone from Street Girls Aid. Caseworkers from the Accra-based nonprofit – including Issah Nare, who lets our team from the United States tag along with him on the job one morning – come here daily to befriend these vulnerable young women so that if a problem arises, they know someone who can help. “A lot of them know who you are, but how long it takes to get comfortable depends on the girl,” he says. We stop to chat with Abida, whose thumb is swollen to three times its normal size; the caseworkers try to persuade her to seek medical help, but she has no insurance and no money to pay for a doctor herself. Later, we run into Aśmău, dressed in a tailored black-and-white polka-dot shirt and striped skirt, who completed the organization’s sewing program, found a job, and is encouraging a friend to do the same.
Street Girls Aid also offers vocational training in cooking and hairdressing, operates daycare centers in slums throughout the city, and runs a home for pregnant teens and new mothers, which provides literacy and life-skills classes. Executive Director Vida Asomaning Amoako says that since the organization was founded in 1994, it has helped the equivalent of “a small village” through its programs.
But several years ago, after almost 20 years of service, the staff at Street Girls Aid faced a crisis of confidence, a need for direction. And that’s where the Rotary team I’m traveling with comes in.
It’s January, going on 10 p.m., and Kathy Stutzman and Cathy Smith, Rotarians from Minnesota, are still at work in their hotel room in Accra, talking about tomorrow’s plans. The room is quiet, air-conditioned, and serene, the tangerine-painted walls the only nod to the chaotic scene we witnessed on the street. Stutzman and Smith are here to lead workshops with Street Girls Aid staff members.
There’s nothing less glamorous than a process. The team isn’t building a school or drilling a well – just doing a lot of discussing and planning. But if what they’re doing works, they’ll help Street Girls Aid capitalize on its upcoming 20th anniversary, strengthening the organization so its staff will have the skills, tools, and confidence to succeed over the next 20 years. Along the way, they’re refining a new direction for Rotary service – helping communities decide what they want and make it happen for themselves – reflecting The Rotary Foundation’s new grant model and its focus on sustainability and capacity building. “Our working theory is ‘no projects,’” explains Smith, a past governor of District 5960 (parts of Minnesota and Wisconsin) and a member of the Rotary Club of Fridley-Columbia Heights. “Instead, what if we build relationships before we build stuff?”
“No projects. Instead, what if we build relationships before we build stuff?”
They’ve been cultivating their relationship with Street Girls Aid for more than a decade. Stutzman, a member of the Rotary Club of Austin, encountered the organization during a Group Study Exchange trip in 2003, and returned the next year on a Volunteer Service Grant to gauge how Rotary might be helpful in the region. As a result, in 2005 her district worked with Kay Bliss, of the Rotary Club of Ojai, Calif., to put together a project to equip the vocational training classrooms.
Years later, in September 2011, the staff at Street Girls Aid – struggling financially and cutting programs – contacted the Rotarians they’d grown to trust. Stutzman asked Smith, who leads strategic planning workshops for Rotary clubs all over the United States, if she could help. From there, things moved fast. They wrote up a district grant application the same month, and the district grant subcommittee provided contingency funds in November. (Contributions also came from the Ojai club and the volunteers themselves, including Stutzman, Smith, Bliss, and another Ojai Rotarian.) The group traveled to Accra in February 2012.
Before leaving on that trip, the team drew up plans for the entire 18 days. After two days on the ground, they scrapped them. “We don’t know their culture,” Smith says. “We needed to listen.” Staff members at Street Girls Aid had thought the Rotarians would come in and give them a strategy, but what they got instead were the tools to create their own.
And that’s what they did. When Stutzman and Smith returned at the organization’s request in November 2012 (funded by another district grant), they assumed they would pick up the planning from where they’d left off. Instead they found that the staff members, eager to act on what they’d learned, had already come up with a mission and goals. So on that second trip, the two helped the staff make more detailed plans, such as installing a library in every daycare center and developing cooking and batiking classes for tourists, allowing the organization to raise money so it wouldn’t be so reliant on outside grants.
The meetings with Stutzman and Smith give the staff a chance to rally, reflect, and reenergize. “When you are in the midst of something, it’s difficult to ask yourself questions. These meetings and workshops help us grow,” Amoako says. Now she facilitates her own workshops, seeking ideas from both staff and teens. Because of the input she received during one of them, the organization has shifted the target age groups for its programming. “If you want to look into the future, you have to have the basics to plan,” Amoako says.
Now Stutzman, Smith, and the rest of our team have traveled to Accra on a third trip through a $24,000 district grant initiative involving 11 Rotary clubs and one Rotaract club. Stutzman and Smith spend their days crammed into a stifling classroom at the Street Girls Aid headquarters with Amoako and the organization’s five senior staff members. They’ve piled notebooks, pens, and trinkets on the tables, intending to make the workshop feel like a conference in the United States, although the electricity occasionally cuts out and the toilets in the building don’t have running water. (A cup and a bucket of water provide the flush power.) Smith stands by a piece of paper taped to the wall, writing as the group brainstorms a long list of people they could include in their anniversary celebration, such as past and current clients, staff, and donors. Stutzman takes a toy microphone and conducts a mock interview for Radio Ghana with Amoako, helping her clarify the message she wants to share.
Stutzman and Smith work together seamlessly, finishing each other’s sentences. Stutzman, or “Mama Kathy,” as the rest of the team affectionately calls her, speaks in mantras like “Let go of your ego” and “Breathe.” She blogs about food, hosts a public television show, and travels the world as a nonprofit consultant. Smith works in roofing and brings a for-profit way of thinking, as well as the perspective and pluck of a self-educated leader who didn’t go to college. But she too speaks in the language of relationship building and connecting, and our seven-member team spends many nights back at the hotel reflecting on the bigger themes behind what Rotary does.
Watching Stutzman and Smith, I wonder if the successes at Street Girls Aid are a result of their specific expertise and dynamo personalities. But they say other Rotarians could do similar work to strengthen nonprofits if they seek out some coaching on their technique. I see this in person with the other members of our team, who learned the basics (train, demonstrate, practice, and debrief) during a few pre-trip training sessions at Smith’s house. In Accra, while Stutzman and Smith hold their seminars with the senior staff, the others spend time with Alfred Ankrah and Adams Afoakwa, two of the life-skills counselors, focusing on the organization’s goal to put a library in every daycare center. Before leaving the United States, the Rotary team connected with Little Free Library, a nonprofit that’s working to put “microlibraries” around the world – decorative handmade boxes that house books in front yards, in front of businesses, and other locations so community members can “take a book, leave a book.” (Read our profile in the March 2014 issue.) They brought along several disassembled libraries as a pilot, with the idea that something as simple as a small wooden box could work at the centers.
The first step is assembling the wooden kits into boxes, and Kathleen Lillis – a real estate agent and youth advocate whose husband, Clare, is a past district governor – takes out the drills and asks Ankrah and Afoakwa whether they’ve ever used power tools. When they say no, she demonstrates how they work, how they charge, and how they run forward and backward. “From there, they were off,” Lillis recalls. They figure out how to build the libraries by looking at a preassembled box the group has brought, and by the third day, when the Rotary team members mention to Afoakwa that they’d never actually put one together themselves, he teaches them how. And by the last day of the team’s visit, Ankrah and Afoakwa are teaching the teens served by the center how to construct the libraries, power tools and all, something that the two men said on day one would never happen. “In working with them, I learned so much about how we can work together. About the meaning of capacity building. About myself,” says Holly Callen, another member of the team and a past governor of District 5950 (Minnesota).
One afternoon, we pile into two vans and drive to Kimbu Crèche, a daycare facility in an area known by locals as “Sodom and Gomorrah.” We pass men who kneel down to pray on two long blue mats outside the center’s wall, and then enter through a gate. Toddlers dressed in red-and-white checked uniforms chant, “Hel-lo, hel-lo, hel-lo,” and run across the sandy playground to hug our legs, stopping us in our tracks. Our driver, John, carries in one of the libraries that Ankrah and Afoakwa have constructed, working with the teens to paint it a bright purple. After a short ceremony, Comfort Azonko, the teacher, organizes the books in her classroom’s new library. It’s even better than she thought it would be, she says. Another teacher asks how to get one in every classroom so the libraries can be tailored to specific age groups. “We are so grateful. What a wonderful library,” Azonko says later as we stand outside and watch the children play on a metal structure painted in primary colors. “I’ll make good use of it for learning.”
While we’re in Accra, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation publishes its annual letter. In it, Bill Gates argues that we need to stop focusing on whether foreign aid works and instead on how to make it work better, starting with involving the recipient countries and local groups in making their own decisions. It’s the model Smith, Stutzman, and our Rotary team have been using. “It’s changing the way we spend money. We’ve spent a lot of money being fixers – let’s put in wells, let’s build some libraries –without talking to local people about how it will impact them,” Smith says.
“It’s listening to people so you can help provide the resources, tools, and knowledge so they have confidence in their competence,” Stutzman says. “They’re the experts in the room.”
As we wind up our time with Street Girls Aid, its staff members are on their way to fulfilling their own goal: celebrating 20 years of helping homeless teens and figuring out a way to make sure the next 20 are equally fruitful. “We could come in and build a building, but the reality is they’re going to be on the ground every day after we’re gone,” Smith says. “If we can help them be the best they can be, that is where we’re going to have the biggest impact.” — Diana Schoberg