Page 12 RAIN July 1982 1 TSO KAM ZA BORLA AMASA^ (Everybody Wants Amasaachina) SELF-HELP LESSONS FROM GHANA AND ELSE by Bruce and Ann Borquist Amasaachina is self-help and self-help work is Amasaachina work to the people of the Northern Region of Ghana, a West African nation the size of Oregon. It means unity, self-reliance, cooperation, and preservation of cultural heritage, and is a powerful force for these causes in Northern Ghana. We worked with the Amasaachina Youth Association for one of our three years of service to Ghana as members of the U.S. Peace Corps, and in the process we learned a great deal about self-help development from people who were experts in its practical application. It is amazing what villages accomplish with Amasaachina encouragement and little else. Self-help is quickly becoming a buzz word — everyone from Ronald Reagan to the head of your neighborhood association is using it these days. What is self-help like in practice and where is it actually being done? Here is an example from our experience with it, and examples of the efforts of self-help groups in other developing nations. The Amasaachina Youth Association was started in the late '60s by university students from Northern Ghana who wanted to use their educahon to help their home villages help themselves."Youth," in the Ghanian sense, are people of any age who are not members of the ruling class. "Amasaachina" is a Dagbani word which means "commoners," and emphasizes that this is a mass movement of the common people to help themselves. By 1981 over 300 of the 450 villages in our district of Northern Ghana had joined the association. Villages become members when they contact the national executive of Amasaachina and request a rally. During the all-night celebration, village leaders and Amasaachina guest volunteers make speeches and young people dance to traditional drumming. Speakers stress the need for unity if the village is going to develop. Anyone who has that village's best interests at heart is considered a member of Amasaachina after that and there are no dues or membership cards to make the association exclusive. Volunteer organizers stay in contact with the leaders chosen during the rally in order to provide encouragement and act as intermediaries if and when a self-help project is undertaken. We were posted to the area in October of 1980 at the request of the Western Dagomba District Coundl. Broadly called Village Development Facilitators, our project was basically to help the Council achieve its development aims as well as we could with no outside financial or material aid. Considering the depressed economy of Ghana, that was a tall order. A member of the Amasaachina executive committee, Mr. Iddrissu Fuseini, became our co-worker and colleague. For over eight years this man had dedicated countless hours to helping his people organize and do self-help projects, even giving up a high-paying job in another area to do this volunteer work. Together the three of us talked to elders in approximately 120 villages about their development priorihes, and soon found ourselves with a surprising problem. So many communities decided to undertake self-help projects that we had to switch our focus from surveying priorities to facilitating projects. Between October 1980 and July 1981 thirty-five villages undertook self-help projects of their own choice and invested over $150,000. The average worker at that time made about $5.60 a day. Villages dug dams for drinking water, started and built elementary schools, conducted literacy classes, constructed public latrines and access roads, and formed co-ops to buy agricultural supplies. The people themselves raised 100 % of the money for these projects. Let's look at how one community organized itself to dig a drinking water dam. The 1000 or so people in this agricultural community raise com, rice, millet, sorghum, tropical yams, and cattle for home consumption and sale. It is reached by a dirt road passable only during the nine-month dry season. The women must walk two miles to the nearest dam with their eight-gallon water cans two to three times each day. When that dries up they walk as far as eight miles for water. Few of the children attend the primary school in the next village two miles away. The farmers are always in need of hoes, machetes, fertilizer, and tractors to hire at reasonable prices when the farming season starts. When we met with the village elders they told us of these problems, and after much discussion they chose constiiiction of a dam as their first development priority. We encouraged them to start work on the dam themselves rather than wait for the government to dig it for them.
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