“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” –Nelson Mandela
Backstory
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5 – Friday, October 29, 2010
Our last day in Tamale is the only one spent outside the Stadium. The morning is spent in the office, getting to know the Camfed staff. I am amazed by their passion, energy and devotion. We spend many more hours than planned moving from one office to the next. They tell us about the vast range of work they are doing, ranging from , to to , and I am sure there is that’s left unsaid.
Of course, they are doing it for a reason, and so along with it all we finally begin to understand what the girls have been through: kayayo, the practice of “portering” in big cities - some go to Accra, some even crossing the border to Togo; houses being burned down during periods of unrest; “fostering”, where a child is sent to live with relatives under the pretence of building familial links but in reality leading to the child going unfed and uneducated; forced marriages under the name of religion and superstitious curses; more religious doctrine saying that women shouldn’t be educated.
But the girls have managed to overcome that. They not only get educated academically, but they know their rights, and they are keen to lead by example and have their “sisters” share in their success. Wendy, the Education Officer, tells us about a group of girls that saw a young girl that wasn’t in school. They dug into it, and found out that she was fostered. They went to confront the father together – something even Wendy would have trepidation doing! – and convinced him to send the girl to school.
We eventually leave the office and head out with William, the Camfed driver, to see a village. The men are at mosque, and so the women welcome us into their huts and even let us take pictures. The huts are small, with thatched roofs, but they have electricity. The heat is unbearable outside, but inside the hut, it stays remarkably cool.
After that, we make it to the market and William takes us to his wife’s stall where she sells fish, spaghetti and oil. We continue around the market, spotting snails, lamb heads, and many other such delicacies on the way.
Somehow, we have not made time for lunch. By the time we are done at the market, we have to be back at the office to pick up Wendy for our school visit. Credit Suisse supports a number of girls at Tamale Senior High School through Camfed, and we are to meet with 34 of them. It’s somewhat awkward to begin, but the girls begin to relax and tell us their favourite subjects, how they interact with boys, and open up about their pasts, crying along the way. They are only 14 years old.
The teacher reminds them that today is a Happy Day, and that we can not let the bad memories control us anymore. We must say No to the sad thoughts when they arrive, so that we can remain strong and can share these stories to those that need to hear them.
When we are leaving, the girls surround us, holding onto our bags, wanting photos taken with us, answering yet more questions. We ask what the male to female ratio is like, and it reminds me how some things never change when they say that there are 6 girls in the Maths class, compared to 42 boys. I tell them that I studied in England, and on my Computer Science degree course, there were 100 boys and 10 girls. They must be strong, they must work hard, and they will show everyone they are just as good as – if not better! – than the boys.
The journey back to the office is interrupted by a funeral celebration which has blocked the road. They celebrate loudly with music and drums for the whole day. We get out of the car and walk down the road instead, taking it all in.
We finally return to the office and re-heat what was intended to be our lunch: rice balls and groundnut soup with chicken. It is delicious, but at 5.30pm, I’m not in the mood for lunch or dinner. Our conversations continue for awhile yet, and finally around 7pm, the office empties of its 8 employees. Aisha drives us back to the hotel, and we converse some more in her car before reluctantly taking our leave.
It seems odd not to be at the hotel restaurant every night, so we go for a drink and have one last chat with our waiter friends. Samson is studying Business Management at the college, having moved from his home in the Volta region for the privilege. He hopes to be a lawyer one day, having already tried his hand at computers but getting bored. It is thanks to him that I have had fantastic wi-fi all week. The Stoke couple are back for their evening meal, and a couple words are exchanged.
The next morning, we set off at 9am for the return 6 hour drive to Kumasi, have a bit of a panic in Kumasi airport where the woman says that we have the wrong booking reference, are not booked on the flight and the flight is in fact full (but then it turns out that we are booked on the flight and the flight is clearly not full), make it to Accra, where the departure board says one time for take-off and our tickets another and no-one seems to know which it is, and finally, finally land in Heathrow Terminal 5 amid the Sunday morning rush.
My feet are tired from the exertion of literally walking in circles for four days, my mind is full from all that I have seen and learnt, only a fraction of which is recorded here, and yet, I wish I could do it all over again - or even better, do another week more.
“Knowledge is power. Information is liberating. Education is the premise of progress, in every society, in every family.” – Kofi Annan (Ghanaian)
Day 4 – Thursday, October 28, 2010
Breakfast shows that the hotel is still busy, as once again we find ourselves grabbing seats on one end of the long table. This time, the rest of the table is occupied by a group of Korean businessmen, accompanied by their African guide. We can’t help but smile as they attempt to choose what to eat, and the guide tells them stories of visiting Korea and being unsuccessful in his attempts to find a girlfriend.
I can’t believe it’s the last day of the workshop already. This time, I am determined to improve the email-account-opening process, and so we spend lunch growing increasingly frustrated with the computers, as the Internet tries its best to sputter and fade away. Mel and I finally give up on our hopes of showing them Google Maps and where we come from in relation to them, and I turn to Excel. This time, I have taken the calculations they did by hand in their Marketing class, and we slowly bring formulas to life. They see calculations automatically update when figures are changed, and then we go the next step and drag the formula across to watch numbers magically appear. This time, they are sold.
The whole time, Aisha has been working quietly in the background, moving from computer to computer and begging them to give life to email. Her prayers are answered. I wrap up spreadsheets and we quickly get them exchanging email addresses in pairs, trying to send one quick message in the hopes of generating some enthusiasm for this terrible technology.
When I speak to my mother that evening, I find myself explaining my journey home in slow steps: first, we are driving to Kumasi. Then, we board a plane to Accra. Then, we take another plane to London. Do you understand?
I worry that I will return to work unable to speak to adults again.
Class finishes at 6.30pm, with feedback forms being scribbled out and a rushed certification ceremony to celebration their accomplishment. Lamisi is starting a new job with the district council on Monday, a job she nearly didn’t get. While they liked her, she didn’t have the requisite ICT skills. She told them Camfed was doing this course, and they agreed that it would suffice. She is not worried about her first day of work anymore.
I’ve spent the whole course silently wondering about the marks embedded on the girls’ faces. Some don’t have them, but for those that do, they are deep scars sweeping across the cheeks. No one has mentioned them, and it’s unclear whether they are signs of abuse, religion or something else entirely. Of course, it is something else entirely. I find out that they are , put on their faces as children to identify their race, ethnic group and cultural background from a glance, originating from the time of slave labour and inter-tribe wars. Unfortunately, the act alone can transmit HIV and cause tetanus infections, the marks later cause scarring and embarrassment. I am told the story of a man, who left his tribe to study for a Masters degree at Oxford, tribal marks covering his whole face. His new-found compatriots convinced him to have plastic surgery, and he was rejected by his tribe on his return. It is now a dying culture, but as evidenced by my girls, it is not dead yet.
“Research in India has found Internet connectivity can be key to improving the livelihood of rural poor by giving them access to information.” – mongabay.com
Day 3 – Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Usual breakfast at the hotel. I’ve given up on the eggs. The yolks are white (apparently due to a lack of pigmentation), which confused me on the first day when I wondered if I had been served solely egg whites, but that’s just the way they are.
Today is swap day. My girls are off for two days of Marketing Skills, and I now have the girls that just finished Marketing Skills. I know what I’m doing this time, so we’re in Paint before they can blink and Word follows soon after. We have WordArt happening before it’s even break time.
It’s back to sardine sandwiches for snacks, and then swiftly on to Mouserobics.
Lunch was chosen in advance today, with options ranging from Bantu and soup to rice and chicken. Only the girls eating Bantu are doing so by hand, and then other girls decide that they don’t care for appearances any longer and start eating the rice by hand – as they should! Antama is 7 months pregnant and hoards her food carefully, saving the leftovers for a snack later in the day. She has a two year old at home, and rings her during lunch for us to speak to, but the child doesn’t quite have the hang of English yet.
The girls all have mobile phones, sometimes two or three. Network competition has resulted in the need for a phone for every network, so you can get the best rates – which are usually reserved for network-to-network calls. I’m told of a girl that had gone somewhere and no one knew where, but her blind grandmother that begged on street corners for a living had a mobile phone, so they rang her to get in touch. It is expected that 70% of the Ghanaian population will have a mobile phone by the end of 2010.
I am increasingly convinced that countries like these will slide straight over the cabled solution, just as they did with telephones. Desktops, laptops, and their ever-present counterpart – wired broadband – will simply never take off with the consumer market here. Smartphones, tablets, cheaper, smaller devices that leverage the mobile phone networks is the way forward.
It occurs to Mel and I that we have seen nothing of Tamale, except for the hotel and the Stadium, neither of which feel like particularly accurate representations of the lifestyle. We go for a walk, assured that we are in a safe area. People fly by, chatting on their mobile phones, lightning lighting up the clouds in the distance, and the roads are full of people going back and forth. The road is lined with shops, and advertisements include “God is with us curtains” (I knew they were religious, but that one makes me laugh) and a row of televisions on display with a matching row of kids seated in front, watching them.
When we finally make it back to the hotel restaurant for dinner, it’s the busiest it has been all week. We can’t find a table that will seat the two of us, so we sit in the middle of the long centre table, clearly designed for sharing. After a few minutes, the couple on one side of the table speak to us. They are from Stoke-on-Trent, both doctors, who chose to spend their retirement teaching at the university in Tamale and have pioneered Problem Based Learning there. They are so pleased that our company gave us the time to do this. Her father was a sanitation engineer and one of their sons is working is Uganda. They love the continent.
“The mediocre teacher tells, the good teacher explains, the superior teacher demonstrates, the great teacher inspires.” – William Arthur Ward
Day 2 – Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Wake up, toast and eggs for breakfast, and to the Stadium for 9am. I ask the technician if the Internet is working and he promises that it will be by the afternoon. For once, luck is on my side, and we have it as we return from the snack break. I send the girls straight to do . The simple plain text pages take painful minutes to load. Apparently we are on Vodafone GPRS.
Snack today was beef sandwiches, which I don’t eat. I wish I had made up a better excuse for not eating rather than telling the truth, because shortly afterwards, a Camfed employee pulls me out of my class to give me a pack of biscuits she had run out and bought so I didn’t go hungry. I didn’t have time for the biscuits then, but they made a welcome snack during the arduous return journey days later.
The youngest member of my class is the 6 month old daughter of Abibatu. She is generally well behaved, spending most of her time eating and sleeping, and wrapped up on her mother’s back in the while mummy learns to type. Sometimes, she wakes up from the blanket that she is sleeping on and decides to go for a wander, but she never gets very far. She has never disturbed or distracted the class - a feat I find rather amazing.
I ask Aisha is there is anything in particular that she wants me to cover in my last couple hours with the girls. She says that she really wants them on email.
It takes 4 hours to set 11 girls up with email accounts. Days later, I read through their feedback forms, asking amongst other things, what they found the most difficult part of the course. “I found opening an email address hard.” I don’t think I have met my objective to enthuse them about the Internet.
Aisha drives us back to the hotel that evening, through a sudden downpour that causes a power failure as we watch from the car. We chase a mosquito out of the car, and I confess that I have two bites already, on one ankle. It is only concerning because we are in malaria country, but I am fortunate to be taking my anti-malaria tablets. In Ghana, government statistics show that malaria is the leading cause of death in children under age five and that 45% of all outpatient hospital visits are malaria-related. However, despite not having a cure to hand, prevention is relatively easy with WHO studies showing that sleeping under a bed net is the best way to avoid malaria, but many families either cannot afford to take such a precaution (which led to the government offering subsidised bed nets for vulnerable people), or choose not to out of ignorance and low literacy levels. Only 35% of Ghanaians sleep under insecticide-treated bed nets.
“Africa is being readied for a major change. The fulcrum for change is technology.” – Mark Rais
Day 1 – Monday, October 25, 2010
After the 7 hour international flight, 1 hour domestic flight, and 6 hour drive to the north of Ghana, we finally arrive in Tamale at 11pm on Sunday night. Aisha, the Camfed Programme Officer, meets us at the hotel the following morning to check that we are ready to go straight into the workshops. Our venue is a short drive away: . It feels a little absurd on approach, but Camfed has a couple rooms hired which suit our needs perfectly.
The girls are already present when I arrive, and so I launch straight into how to turn on a computer and move the mouse. I learn to speak slowly, in shorter sentences, and finish every statement with a question so they can tell me if they don’t understand. My feet keep moving in a circle around the room, checking that every girl is on the right step. We open Paint and after a few false starts, Ghanaian flags, stick people, and random patterns start appearing.
We have a snack break at 11am. Today is sardine sandwiches. Back to class, and now we learn how to type in Microsoft Word. The girls love the colours in WordArt and ClipArt. Lunch is Red-Red, a local dish with plantain, beans, rice and fish or chicken.
In the afternoon, I attempt the unthinkable and move to Microsoft Excel. They can find cells, they can type in them, but formulas present a bit of a problem. The teaching technique I have chosen is simply not making sense. We move swiftly on.
The Internet still hasn’t been connected. The technician, employed by the only computer company in town (which incidentally had to shut down for the week as they were providing us their only computers), casually says the Internet will be working tomorrow. I am not convinced. The girls learn to open, close and save documents, and I give them USB pen drives to take their words and pictures with them in the hopes that it will motivate them to use a computer once more after I leave.
Class is meant to finish at 4pm, but it is too easy to lose track of the time. We finish at 4.30pm.
My evening consists of discovering that I can not send or receive text messages, no one can call me, and the only thing that works is phoning out. Dinner is precisely at 7.30pm. Mel and I chat until the hotel restaurant closes at 10pm, and I retire to sleep.
“Girls like me in rural Africa have the same dreams and ambitions as girls everywhere, but they are destroyed by poverty.” – Penelope Machipi
Earlier this year, my employer, Credit Suisse, launched a pilot 'Global Citizens Program' to supplement our existing Global Education Initiative. As it says on :
The Credit Suisse Global Education Initiative is supporting selected international development organisations to improve the education opportunities for 45,000 young people through locally relevant programs in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Asia Pacific.
The Global Citizens Program was designed to add an employee engagement angle to the GEI, and involves sending employees on one-week assignments with our partner charities. I was fortunate to not only get a place, but to be selected for my top choice of placement, with the NGO , in Ghana. Again, they say it best themselves:
Camfed plays a catalytic role in the transformation of young people’s lives by providing a holistic package of support, including formal education for girls at school, health awareness, and business and leadership training for young women who have left school.
My assignment was to deliver IT Skills training to those young women who have left school. It's incredible to think that the girls had to sit IT exams at school, without ever having seen a computer, many with their teachers never having seen a computer. Around 100 girls applied for the workshop, of which 30 were selected. Selection was primarily based on location - Camfed has a partnership with Google and will be launching "Google centres" in some of the districts and wanted to ensure that the people located in those districts had the necessary knowledge to take advantage of the imminent facilities.
One week seemed like a ridiculously short amount of time, but afterwards, it seemed just right. I travelled with another CS employee, Mel, who was to deliver Marketing Skills training at the same time. Actually, our group of 30 girls was split into two groups of 15, where one group did IT for 2 days and the other did Marketing, and then they swapped - so the course was run twice.
I'll be posting my recollections from that week (modified from the original paper version I scribbled down!) to this blog over the next few days. It's mainly for my own record, but in case anyone is still looking here, it feels as relevant as anything I've written about before. Women in IT, all the world over.
(And, for anyone interested in getting a snapshot glance at the impact of IT training in sub-Saharan Africa, there's a good from the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women initiative with Camfed Zambia. Fantastic stuff.)
“Girls just need support, encouragement and mentoring to follow through with the sciences.” – Sally Ride
There's a really nice article on BBC News, continuing the story of . The focus is on Naoko Yamazaki, the second Japanese woman to go into space. Her story embodies what the fight for equality is about for me, because she isn't a woman that 'has it all'. She doesn't do space training and then go home and care for the kids. Nor does she do her exciting job while her husband does his and the nanny takes care of the rest. No, Yamazaki's husband stays at home with their seven year old daughter.
That's a concept that doesn't seem to have caught on yet, especially in a country where the women were referred to as 'birth machines' not so very long ago. Oddly enough, the Japanese are calling her Mum Astronaut.
So many people are focused on why women aren't reaching the tops of their professions - be it IT, finance or politics, and consequently there's a lot of effort on making things look exciting for the school kids, recruitment from universities, mentoring for young professionals, and awards for women on their way up. But none of that addresses the main reason women leave or don't progress up the ladder: family.
I've written about the 10,000 hour theory before, and the The Glass Hammer had an interesting a few days ago specifically looking at the familial issues surrounding women in investment banking.
I am not a fan of 'outsourcing', as the terminology goes these days. Part of having children is raising them, and I strongly believe that the best way to instill values and behaviour is by exemplifying them whilst spending time with them. Whether that interaction occurs from the mother or the father is up for debate, but the fact remains that it simply isn't a choice right now.
The focus is on maternity policies, childcare opportunities and flexible working arrangements. None of these will ever be good enough. If anything, they encourage frantic running around and the myth that women can have it all. What we need is a change in culture and mindset. We need to believe that children are important, and that mums aren't the answer to everything.
“Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good.” – Charlotte Whitton
March was women's month in many ways, from it being in the U.S. to on March 8th, but now that it's all over, it's nice to see that we're not out of the news just yet. Here's quick round-up of the latest:
- : In 1892 an Asian first gained the title Member of Parliament, and it was unsurprisingly a man. 118 years later, it looks like Asian women are finally going to make their move.
- : On Monday, three women - Dorothy Metcalf-Lindenburger, Stephanie Wilson and Naoko Yamazaki - will be sent into space aboard Nasa's Discovery space shuttle. They will join Tracy Caldwell Dyson, who is already in space on her second mission, making it the first time that four women will be in space at the same time. While it is wonderful news that more and more women are being sent into space, they will still unsurprisingly be outnumbered by the men. Will the day ever come when we have the majority?
- : Sarah Blow founded the Girl Geek Dinners in 2005 because she was tired with the stereotypes and problems that women in technology face, and she wanted a way to network with other women in technology. Five years later, it's expanded massively beyond London to reach 57 locations across 21 countries. Sarah and Girl Geek Dinners have been selected as a finalist in the people's choice award in the Enterprising Young Brits 2010 - so feel free to give her your vote.
- : It's nothing we didn't know already and haven't heard before, but a Commons Treasury Committee report (which only had one woman on the committee) has published its findings to remind us once again. Women are poorly represented in the city and there's a huge pay gap.
“The best way to shatter the glass ceiling, she said, is first to shatter the myth that you can have it all.” – Mrs Moneypenny
Monday is International Women's Day 2010. I had expected one of the FT writers, a Mrs Moneypenny, to write about it - because she touches on a range of interesting issues around women in business - but instead she chose to ignore it and focused on something else.
It's an unheard, unsaid, shameful truth: .
It's thankfully not because we are somehow inferior. No, it's because no one can. Superman doesn't exist. Superwoman, less so. No one can have it all. Men have never had it all - it's just that 99.9% of them like to think they do, and like to tell the world it. But the sad truth is that men made the decision to go for the career and to leave their families behind. There is a small but fighting group of stay at home dads, and while they get the occasional mention in some news article, they generally are fighting for parental rights and leave the work/life balance issue alone. Most men, it seems, don't feel the need to have it all.
So why do women? There are countless reports and surveys produced showing the lack of women on FTSE 100 boards, and even more reports (usually produced by our Scandinavian friends) quantifying the benefits of gender balanced boards. No wonder career driven women are so focused on entering that elusive echelon where they can increase profitability by their mere existence.
Unfortunately, the truth has finally emerged. You can go and sit on a board and be that superwoman, but something else has got to give. It doesn't take a genius to realise that it's going to be the family - if you managed to find the time to have one in the first place. Countless networks and organisations work to find ways to enable women to keep their hands and feet firmly in both worlds, but is it time to admit defeat? Perhaps women can't have it all.
“Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.” – Douglas Adams
Last Friday, the made it's director, , redundant. The decision itself was far more melodramatic than that statement, from the information garnered by the media. It's said that staff were given thirty minutes notice to attend a meeting in which it was announced by the chief executive, that she was locked out of her grace-and-favour flat immediately, that she was offered a superb redundancy package which she turned down, that she had wrecked the prestigious institution's finances, that an 'old boys' club' culture was really behind it all.
Unsurprisingly, the bit that seems to have taken off is the 'old boys club' claims. Lady Greenfield made a statement saying that she will be presenting a claim in the employment tribunal which will include allegations of sex discrimination.
"I am the only female who has been appointed to this iconic post throughout the 211-year history of the Royal Institution, and I cannot see how this decision can be in the best interests of the organisation or its members."
Lady Greenfield is widely acknowledged to have been a fantastic asset to the Ri: she is clever, accessible and most importantly, can explain science to mere mortals. But science isn't accountancy, and finance always comes first - as the credit crunch should well have taught us all. All charities have to file their with the Charity Commission. The mere fact that their accounts and annual return for 2008 were filed three months late speaks of poor internal governance, and the Trustee's report discusses issues around their finances.
Digging deeper into the return brings up the page with the Staff Costs, drilling specifically down to the employees earning over £60k. It doesn't take a genius to figure out where the Director falls. Earlier pages also show the Director's Office expenses, with another ~£207k to it's name.
The Ri says that they can no longer afford the post of Director, hence it - and she - is being made redundant. But do those numbers add up? Or is it really a matter of personal actions: she spent too much money, they were too narrow-minded to take any more of her supposed drama (the tabloid interested in Greenfield's marital affairs was particularly uncalled for), and so it was inevitable that this would be the parting of their ways.
It's one hell of a way to make a point - fire her, logic would say, don't stop yourselves from being able to have a director altogether. While I'm sure that they could construe a new position that does half the job (with half the salary) with a new title to avoid the issue of filling a redundant post, it's also the type of behaviour that gives the corporate world it's bad name. Following suit seems unwise.
If this all is a personal matter, as Greenfield claims, then the Trustees and Executives will have to move fast to restore their balance. It's a shame to loose Greenfield, but it would be a far greater loss to lose the Ri altogether. In proving the Ri wrong, she may well hammer the final nail in their coffin - and that's without sex discrimination tagged on.
Ironically enough, as I wrote this, I received an email from womenintechnology.co.uk inviting me to their next event, '', hosted by none other than the Royal Institution of Great Britain. Wonderful timing. I wonder if this will increase or decrease the size of the audience?