Over the October half-term Laila and I travelled to Ghana on an inspiring trip full of work experience and culture.

The trip was organised by Laila’s mother who works for Amplify Change; a multi-donor challenge fund that supports civil society advocacy for sexual and reproductive health and rights. In Ghana, they collaborate with African Women’s Development Fund (AWDF) so we spent some time working with these motivated women in Accra. We visited 2 grants: the Ghana Federation of Disability Organisations (GFD) and Gender Studies.

Laila and I sat in on a meeting for GFD. We learnt that they are an umbrella organisation that represent over 3 million people with disabilities in Ghana.

We then watched a monitoring session for two schools, that were at the heart of a slum in Accra, who had Gender Studies in their schools. Gender Studies has a free hotline for children who are suffering from abuse and they also run PSHE like sessions for students. However, by visiting these schools we met some influential pupils, but we also realised that the hotline was not being used. Therefore, Amplify Change will be putting the money from the hotline into counselling for schools.

After being in Accra for a few days we headed east to Ada Foah, we stayed beside a beautiful lagoon, went for a boat ride in the setting sun and even held baby crocodiles. We also travelled an hour out of Ada Foah to a small village called Seva where we had some friends working out there with Project Trust. Laila and I had a tour around their school, which was quite a culture shock. Bea and Chloe (our friends teaching out there) had a long-drop toilet and no running water. Despite this, they seemed to be enjoying it and their pupils were definitely benefiting from their hard work, especially due to the fact that if they weren’t there then two classes simply wouldn’t have a teacher. The children taught us their local dances for a festival that was coming up, they found it quite funny that we apparently couldn’t do any of the moves right! We also helped them practice their English and they were all very eager to talk.

We then travelled back to Accra and spent our last few days exploring-we went to a market and haggled for the best prices and also went around Jamestown and Accra.

It was a truly inspiring trip where we were shown the impacts of the over-indulgence of the Western world and where we met the most motivated, strong women that are fighting for their rights across Africa.

By Amelia (4^th Form)