Friends of Adaklu

I am the executive director of Friends of Adaklu and we are applying for the funds in order to establish a sanitary pad manufacturing facility in the village of Adaklu Dawanu in Eastern Ghana. It is our intention to use the bio waste created by our cooperative farming project to produce the sanitary pads. We have partnered with PridePads Africa for this venture but need funds to research and develop a process for turning the cassava and maize bio waste into paper suitable for sanitary pads. Part of the funds would be used for this research. Another part of the funds would be used to design and build a machine tailor made for turning the cassava and maize paper into sanitary pads, while the remainder of the funds would be used to train villagers in the use and maintenance of the machines. We would be helping to develop a prototype that would be reproducible and could be used throughout the third world wherever cassava and maize are grown. We have chosen to partner with PridePads Africa because they are an established organization with a good track record who have already developed markets and marketing.

I first visited Adaklu in 2012 and was deeply moved by the determination of the community to lift itself out of the poverty cycle. Being a filmmaker and university instructor I knew I had the skill set and resources to help the villagers of Adaklu Dawanu. I asked 2 Ghanaian friends for guidance and Friends of Adaklu was born in 2013. Our vision was to focus on one community so we could easily correct missteps and learn as we went along. The villagers needed food security, financial stability, education for all, and health care. We work with the community to figure out what issues they would like to tackle and then research the resources they have available. Then we provide whatever is lacking so that we can solve the problem together. We provide tools, supplies (seeds, fertilizer, fencing), connections, information, education, demonstrations and workshops. We never provide money. We work together on every project so the community has a sense of ownership and pride. This ensures their buy-in and the continued maintenance of what we have achieved together. Our goal for the future is to use what we have learned in Dawanu and extrapolate that out into other communities.

The specific problem we are trying to resolve is that menstruating girls do not attend school 5 days a month because they are on their period and do not have access to sanitary products. This problem affects all girls and women in the region - probably 150 girls in Dawanu and approximately 5000 in the Adaklu region are missing 60 days of education a year due to lack of sanitary products. While this is a grave problem it is also a business opportunity that lets us make use of our farming bio waste, turning it from trash into cash. These are the sorts of situations that we love at FOA; environmentally sound, economically sustainable and with a big enough impact to have a significant positive effect on the community's well being. All of our projects follow this model. We always work with the community and never impose on them. We respect them and they trust us. We provide the tools and information they need to succeed, but insist that they do most of the work; that way the success belongs to them and they remain fully engaged in what we have accomplished together. 

We're innovative because we stay small and tightly focused. We work on one problem at a time until we find a solution and then we step back and learn from the community how the resolution plays out. We spend a lot of time talking to the community and its leaders, involving them and making sure they have a voice in how their village grows and changes. Perhaps what makes our work unique is that it is based on individuals. We have learned that the answer is not in putting up buildings but in investing in people. We are not an organization devoted to a single cause like building schools. We work inside the community and find solutions to whatever problems come along and then we stay to make sure it works out. We have been unintentionally disruptive. The husband of one of our cassava farming women decided to work alongside her on Her farm. This resulted in an uproar among the other men of the village because he had stooped to do women's work, but seeing the profits of their joint effort accumulating in the bank gave the others pause and has made them examine their roles in the community.

FOA's impact on humanity is one person at a time. Because we believe in a hand up not a hand out we build skills as we go, thereby building self-confidence and self-reliance in those we assist. We believe that if you change the life of one person you change the world and that is what we are doing through our education sponsorship program, our cassava and mushroom farming projects, our school and community gardens, our library and computer learning centre, our health clinic and premature baby unit. Each time we touch a life we try to ignite a dream of a bright and prosperous future, and then we work to make it happen through determination, perseverance and plain hard work. Leonardo Da Vinci said there is no such thing as failure because when you do not succeed you have learned what doesn't work and that brings you one step closer to success. That is our model. We just keep talking and trying and reaching out, until we get it right, on person at a time.