Ghana may not require any aid at all …
By any measure Ghana is a success story. The first African country to gain independence in 1957 following 83 years of colonial rule by the British, it is now a stable democracy whose last five elections have been deemed free and fair. It has made huge progress in reducing poverty, having already met the millennium development goals on poverty and hunger, and boasts a growth rate that places it among the best-performing economies in the world.
And yet these impressive statistics seem to count for very little when we arrive, after a two-and-a-half-hour journey north of Tamale, at the small village of Kpasenkpe and visit the clinic.
It is a clinic, in a sense. There is a building, and a nurse. There are vaccinations for children’s immunisation programmes. But there is precious little else in this bare, three-room brick building. A few yards in the dusty distance are some small houses; in better days, these served as nurses’ quarters.
Fatahiya Yakubu, 24, is one of the two nurses at the clinic serving 30,000 people in this and neighboring villages. Only it doesn’t serve them. Not really. It has nothing to offer beyond vaccinations and wound dressings.
Yakubu is stoic as she surveys the barren clinic. She tells a story of a man who arrived on a day when it was short-staffed and there was no one to put a tourniquet on his wound. The nearest hospital is an hour and a quarter’s drive away in Walewale, but there are no cars here and the single ambulance that serves the area has to cater for over 100,000 people. The patient died before he could reach hospital.
Yakubu is trained to nurse, but the scope for nursing is limited. “If this place got help, things would go very well and our dreams would be met,” she says.
Bono, lead singer of U2 and a veteran aid activist, is also on the trip representing ONE, the advocacy group he helped set up, which, with various partners, is campaigning for transparency in Africa’s booming commodities industry.
It is also fighting for countries such as the UK to double “smart”, or evidence-based, aid for the Global Fund, founded by former UN secretary general Kofi Annan to fight HIV/Aids, tuberculosis and malaria. He is listening to Yakubu’s story; when she has finished he remarks, partly to himself, and partly to her: “It’s a ghost clinic – it’s a memory of a clinic.”
Prior to the visit to Kpasenkpe, where he teamed up with Sachs – a key architect in creating the Global Fund – Bono hosted a group of senior Republicans from the US Senate in Accra. After visiting Ghana he spent the rest of the week travelling to neighboring countries.
Bono can be a lightning rod for criticism, though few of his critics probably know much about the time he spends in Africa, or his lobbying in the world’s capitals as he pesters foreign leaders for foreign aid. His critics are voluble, but it is difficult to argue with the improvement in the lives of African people who escape the scourges of HIV, TB and malaria as a direct result of the programmes that he and his aid partners support.
Posted by admin
on Feb 11 2012. Filed under African News.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0.
You can leave a response or trackback to this entry