COAST BRIDGE-GHANA
PROJECTS
1
EDUCATION
Education providers are often unable, or unwilling, to provide services tailored to mobile and migratory populations, which include many people who fish for a living. The educational status of parents also plays an important role in deciding to send children to school and in their ability to support their children’s education.
Strong occupational identities and the impact of child labour may also reduce school enrollment and attendance.
Economic conditions in these communities also contribute to lack of education, engendering scarce education enhancement materials. Because of the financial status of most of the parents of these children, they are unable or unwilling to provide the necessary learning materials such as books, pens, bags and school uniform, shoes etc.
We at Coast Bridge-Ghana have adopted diverse strategies and methods of addressing the educational and literacy challenges of these rural fishing villages including having an open air classrooms for informal education and regular and structured classrooms for formal school as well as reaching parent of the children in the house in our quest to improving literacy in the village.
2
HEALTH
Research shows that the healthcare needs of individuals living in rural areas are different from those in urban areas, and rural areas often suffer from lack of access to healthcare.
Our fishing communities are now turning into refuse dumping site, and our beaches are filled with litter. Many fishing communities lack the means and policies to keep the environment clean and healthy. These behaviours have led to wide spread diseases and sickness.
Coast Bridge-Ghana is adopting a proactive, preventive approach by educating the inhabitants of these communities to keep the environment clean and also adopt personal hygiene and other healthy practices to keep the inhabitants healthy.
Coast Bridge - Ghana also liaises with doctors, health practitioners and partners to organize health education occasionally to sensitize the community on preventive sickness and diseases as well as campaigns on keeping the environment clean.
3
ECONOMIC EMPOWERMENT
In most fishing villages, the men are the main income earners since they fish; however, the women also engage in petty fish mongering by way of buying and selling of the fish. This means that the woman’s survival is solely dependent on the man.
Fishing activities in the villages are usually done in the morning.This means woman sit idle everyday with little or no income to feed themselves and family.
The center Coast Bridge-Ghana aims to develop will be a place where many skills can be acquired by the women which they will also pass down to their generations to give other alternatives of income other than the fishing.
Some of the possible craft and Art work that we think can easily be learnt by the women include soap making, bead making, basket weaving, and hat making.
This will generate income for the women and their families; it will also create part time jobs for many of the women and will enable the women to send and support their children in school. It will create skills for income generating other than fishing. Widows or unmarried women can be financially independent.
