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Though my focus whilst here in Lawra is on our Special Needs Awareness Programme (SNAP), it is a great opportunity to meet our new small business owners, supported under our business development programme (BizATE).
On Tuesday, I set off with project assistant Edith to Dowine, a village about 30 minutes motorbike ride on a beautifully tree-lined, dusty road east of Lawra town. Alongside the launch of our school feeding programme into Dowine Junior High School in January, we began supporting small business owners in the area with training, small grants and ongoing mentoring to grow their businesses.
First stop was John. He was hard at work at his workshop stripping down some mechanical odds and ends ready to melt down and cast into metal cooking pots. Edith and John talked through how the business has been going, recording profits and discussing challenges which have arisen in the last month, whilst his daughter delighted in discovering how to take selfies on my phone.
Next up we came to meet Cecelia, a seamstress busy making the uniforms for our school cooks at Dowine JHS. Her newly rented workshop has a line hung with row upon row of eye-catching cloth - a visual waiting list of orders for dresses! Next we came to Margaret's weaving workshop where her apprentice is weaving the most beautiful traditional cloth of white cotton with sparkly pink threads running through it (the photos do not do it justice!).
We then visited Christina at her salon in a deserted Dowine market. She explains that business has been slow. It is farming season and the women won't come to have their hair done when they are working so hard in the fields. During this quiet time she is missing Cecelia who used to sew on the veranda of her salon.
Before we head to the school, Cecelia runs down the road to join us and it's clear to see the sisterly bond between these women, all working hard to make a success of their small businesses. Margaret, with her infectiously warm and fun-loving spirit insists on handing me literally a carrier bag of groundnuts - an extremely generous gesture - which a week later I am still working my through!
Edith and I then head to the school for a meeting with Mr Kaaratoure, a retired Ghana Education Service special education officer who was involved with setting up the disabled children's group in Jirapa called ESONG. We sit down to plan a community meeting in Dowine. The aim is to bring the community together to raise awareness of disability, explain the benefits of our SNAP programme and discuss the possibility of setting up a new SNAP group in Dowine.
We have a large number of families who come to our monthly SNAP meetings in town from the communities and villages surrounding Dowine, such as Boo, Baazing, Eremon and Zambo. We provide some dedicated transportation for our SNAP members along this route but the increasing numbers we are reaching means this is becoming a challenge. We want to be able to bring SNAP closer to their own doorsteps and enable more disabled children in the area to benefit from ATE's support.
We hope that by creating a hub of our support from all of our programmes - school feeding, business development and special needs awareness - to be able to have a real impact in reducing poverty and improving people's lives.
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