Last week we welcomed Thomas and Daniel from Health Care IT for Africa e.V. (HITA), a German NGO which is running a number of projects for improving health care education and provision in rural parts of Ghana. The HITA team was visiting the Ho District and other parts of the country for monitoring progress on HITA founded projects and discussing the way ahead with local stakeholders. In Adaklu, their particular interest was in witnessing the results from 2021’s one-year Digital Community Engagement Project, which had been funded by HITA together with a German donor organisation, the Schmitz Stiftungen (from funds provided by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development).
Thomas and Daniel with the GYDF team visited Adaklu Kordiabe community, for which they needed to climb up Mount Adaklu by foot since the condition of the single road into the village does not allow travel by car.
Once there, they interacted with the community’s inhabitants and chiefs to ascertain how positively the project has impacted on their lives. It was fun and very interactive as the team was received with good gesture by the community. Community members demonstrated to the visitors how a greater emphasis on gender equality in day-to-day life has improved the well-being of both women and men, as well as the children. They promised to keep working on overcoming any barriers to women’s full participation in communal live and in addressing challenges related to sexual and reproductive health – a particular problem in Adaklu, which suffers from above-average rates of teenage pregnancies and high maternal and new-born mortality.
The HITA team then went on to visit to two health care facilities in Adaklu District that had benefited earlier from the donation of hospital equipment. These facilities are the Adaklu Waya EP Clinic in Waya and the Hasu Community Clinic at Helepke. Thomas and Daniel checked on whether the equipment donated to these facilities was held in good shape and asked for their routine maintenance in order to get full the benefit of them. The items donated included hospital beds, wheelchairs, cabinets as well as computer infrastructure.
Th teams of HITA and GYDF used the opportunity of the visit to discuss and agree on future joint activities, including a feasibility study for a project to provide ICT skills to underprivileged adolescent girls in the communities of Adaklu with a view to enable them to act as access points to health information which is available online. We will report about this exciting new project in a separate post.