Empowering the children of Teshie Primary School

Roughly 3,000 children come to school every day to Teshie Primary School at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean. The sheer size of numbers means the children must attend their mud floored, dank and dark brick classrooms in shifts. When it rains the school yard dissolves into a quagmire and the children are often sent home during school time as water cascades through the roof of the building. For these children, there is not a single toilet, not a single water tap, not a single wash up facility and no electricity in their school.

When their eyes become accustomed to the dark interior of the classrooms, only a collection of small wooden desks and a blackboard nailed to the wall suggests the structure could be a place of formal state learning in the 21st Century.

Up to 350,000 people live in the Teshie suburb where the school is situated. It is a sprawling mass of township where as many as 15 people live in each home. However, home is most frequently a shack built from any material to handstone, concrete block, corrugated iron or wood. All put together without any obvious planning and strewn along the edge of broken roads, unpaved paths or dirt tracks.

ESB wants to transform Teshie Primary School into a place where children can be educated, nourished and ultimately allow them to extract themselves from the endemic poverty into which they were born.

The West Africa Republic of Ghana is flanked by the Ivory Coast to the west, Burkina Faso to the north, Togo on the east and the Atlantic Ocean to the south. It is along a beachhead on this Atlantic coastline that the clusters of houses are built to form Teshie Primary School. The population of Ghana has exploded from just three million in the 50's to an estimated 22 million today. Average life expectancy is just 58, infant mortality is 55 per 1000 children and per capita income is less than 2,500 dollars a year.

People throng from the countryside to the capital in search of paid employment that, largely, does not exist. The streets of Accra are teeming with thousands seeking survival through trading almost anything in the markets, small shops and kiosks.

But Ghana is considered fortunate in the African context. It is a constitutional democracy, there is no political conflict and the land is fertile enough to grow cocoa, rice, coffee, corn and fruit. In spite of this and the significant natural resources, the vast majority of the population live in extremely poor conditions. Women, in particular work endlessly to produce food for their families.

The staple diet consists of a common African dish called Fou-Fou, a starchy food made from millet, yams or cassava that is scooped up with the fingers from a pot and eaten with stew.

A lot of energy goes into producing a meal. The women squat on the ground, rhythmically kneading the Fou- Fou dough in a clay pot until it is smooth and round, like an unbaked yeast loaf. As the women knead, a helper pounds the mixture with a round-head mallet and each time, she draws her hand away just as the wood strikes the dough.

The children, who have never known the benefits of technologies taken for granted in the developed world, are fed Fou-Fou or rice and a little meat or fish each day at the Teshie Primary School. Local women come each day to a kitchen in the school yard to boil and toil over half a dozen gas burners and miraculously produce enough food for over 3,000 children. There is no dining hall, just a plate that each child brings to school to accept the humble ration. The promise of a meal like this is sufficient to bring attendance levels to an unprecedented high at Teshie Primary School.

Under the ESB plan, the transformation of the school can be completed by next spring. Electricity will be brought to the site, and each of the seven houses scattered around the school yard will be reroofed. Windows will replace the current slits in the wall that keep the classrooms dim and airless. The mud floors will be sealed, toilets will be built and water will be piped in. Storage for books will be provided and the kitchen will be rehabilitated. The school yard that currently dissolves into mud will be landscaped and planted. The school complex will be enclosed to obviate the current situation where the public freely walk through the grounds to reach the nearby beach.

The project is an ambitious one, designed to make a lasting impact on the lives of the people in Teshie. It will be completed with the help of ESB workers who are volunteering to travel to Accra in Spring 2008 to finish the work. EM