Case study compiled by Nii Doodo Dodoo, National Volunteering Programme Manager
Knowledge of local and national volunteering within Ghana
Volunteerism as a way of responding to national challenges has been used both at community and state levels, but without much strategic thinking about its usefulness as a long-term developmental tool. There are numerous examples of communities and the state calling on citizens to offer one voluntary service or the other. This is an indication of a societal acceptance of the usefulness of volunteering to our collective well-being.
Confronting this general acceptance of the relevance of volunteering is a national capacity gap to design and manage organized volunteerism. This presents great opportunities for the development of national volunteering initiatives in Ghana.
National Volunteering contributions to the Programme Area Plans
Ghana’s NV programme was strategically designed to contribute to the education programme area plan. The programme was developed in response to the acute shortage of teachers in Northern Ghana and was an important part of a strategic move away from placing VSO volunteers in classroom placements to education management roles.
In the first year (2003), 53 national volunteers served one year placements as teachers in Senior Secondary Schools in the Upper East region. In 2004, the programme was expanded to cover schools in the Upper West and Northern regions and a total of over 600 national volunteers were recruited. The programme has been scaled up by The National Service Scheme (the government agency running the programme) and currently there are over 2000 volunteers serving through out the 10 regions in Ghana.
Needs/interests/opportunities for (further) VSO support
Based on our experience from the national volunteer teaching programme, we are developing a framework for mainstreaming national volunteering into the other programme areas, namely secure livelihoods and disability. There are many more potential volunteers that apply for the teaching programme than the programme is able to engage. The framework will therefore channel the relevant skills to support work in disability and secure livelihoods.
Furthermore, we are also looking at helping to generally promote national volunteering as a viable national development tool. In this direction we are undertaking several initiatives, some of which are:
- working with UNV to set up a national volunteering coalition for advocacy and experience sharing purposes;
- working with traditional authorities towards their involvement as volunteers in the local decision making process;
- designing a health related volunteer programme in both curative and preventive healthcare.
Examples of the “multiplier effects” of National Volunteering
In Ghana as elsewhere, education is acknowledged to be the primary tool for developing the country’s human resource and economic sustainability, but the sector is critically constrained by a dire shortage of teachers. The northern regions are the most disadvantaged in the country and the difficulty of attracting teachers to work there is both a cause and a consequence of poverty. VSO has for fifty years supported the Ghana Education Service to increase the quality and availability of Education. What VSO has never been able to deliver is the sheer volume of teachers needed.
Since 2003 we have been supporting the National Service Scheme to develop a program where young graduates from urban centres in the south volunteer to spend a year teaching in rural schools. VSO has provided training, guidance and initial seed funding for the program development phase. The programme which started with 53 volunteers in 21 schools in the Upper East region of Ghana is now placing volunteers in all the 10 regions in the country. There is a target of 5000 national volunteer teachers in the current year, and the likelihood of filing placements in both Junior secondary and primary schools.
