It is a fact that every child’s dream is to be a responsible person and be able to contribute meaningfully to society one day. It is also a fact that when poverty strikes, those dreams vanish in a blink of an eye without a trace.
Basangwe Wemuye is one of such children in the Kazugu community, a suburb of Kassena-Nankana West in the Upper East Region.
Wemuye’s dream was to become a teacher someday, but that dream got vanished in class 3 when her parents due to poverty asked her to stop schooling as they could not support her educational needs.
According to her, she became a dropout and was wandering around in the community; fetching water for people to cater for her family without a thought that one day she will get rescued.
But for the timely intervention of the UKAID’s STAGE project, Wemuye was lucky to be among the 454 out-of-school Girls in the Kassena-Nankana West District in the Upper East Region who got graduated as professional entrepreneurs.
Basangwe Wemuye and her colleagues after going through six months of intensive apprenticeship training in Hair-braiding, bead making, pastries, soap making, and smock wearing graduated with approved certificates.
The initiative organized by Link Community Development seeks to provide out-of-school girls with the requisite knowledge and opportunities to become responsible individuals in society.
Link Community Development which is a non-profit organization that focuses on improving teaching and learning as well as improving the livelihoods of vulnerable groups in rural areas, has, therefore, implemented a project dubbed “Strategic Approach to Girls’ Education (STAGE) project” to realize such vision.
Speaking at the graduation ceremony held at Paga Catholic Social Center, the Upper East Regional Coordinator of Link Community Development, Faara Joachim admonished the graduates to put to use the skills acquired to support themselves.
He said, “We have come here to do the graduation ceremony for 454 girls who have finished the vocational skills training program of the non-formal track of the STAGE project and we have given them NVTI supported certificates. It has been very successful; we have also given them kits and cash to start with. We pray their parents can also support them with some other capital to be able to buy the input such that, they do not sell the materials. We will follow up for one year and support them to make sure that they succeed.”
The Strategic Approaches to Girls’ education (STAGE) is a two-track project (Formal & Non-Formal) aimed at lowering the barriers faced by marginalized girls in their attempt to obtain a quality education, which Link Community Development led by World Education International (WEI) and UKAID are championing at various selected communities in the region.
Source: A1radioonline.com|101.1 MHz|Moses Apiah|Ghana
