People outside of Ghana might not have
heard of the term ‘galamsey’. It’s derived from the phrase ‘gather them and
sell’ which was used during colonial times to refer to miners illegally gathering
minerals such as gold and selling them. Stamping out galamsey is now a major
rallying cry and something that all Ghanaians are aware of. There are adverts
on the main television news, Joy News, with an appeal to the citizenship values
of the Ghanaian people. The practice is regard as leading to environmental destruction,
water pollution, deforestation and is moreover seen as anti-social, selfish and
running counter to African community values. I learnt more about galamsey
during the last few weeks as nearly all of our 19 Ghanaians enrolled on our new
Masters’ course which we have just started to deliver in Ho, Volta Region,
mentioned it in their formative essays. It’s clearly at the forefront of their
minds!
It’s also on the government’s mind, as this
official government site shows: http://www.ghana.gov.gh/index.php/2012-02-08-08-32-47/features/1234-galamsey-operations-and-sustainable-development-in-ghana
One colleague has joined the course from
Sierra Leone, but otherwise all our new students are from Ghana. We are delivering
the course at the new public University of Health and Allied Sciences, which is
currently being built under the able leadership of the Vice-Chancellor, Professor
Fred Binka. Students will gain a Leeds Met Masters degree, along the lines of the
course delivery we currently offer in Zambia and The Gambia.
Health promotion is relatively strong in
Ghana, though there has been a slow approach to implementing the government’s
health promotion policy, which has been in draft form since 2005. Recently,
there was a high level meeting to consider how to progress health promotion and
adopt more joined up thinking and a more upstream approach cross the entire
policy spectrum. Our role in educating more health promoters will contribute to
this scaling-up, and we already propose that we will have a further intake in
October 2014. The Commonwealth Scholarships Commission has willingly sponsored
15 students in the first intake.
Galamsey is not the only major health
hazard facing sustainable development in Ghana. It is however, often the act of
desperate people – most people do not ‘choose’ to behave in lawless ways unless
they are constrained in the ‘choices’ available to them. Ghana has recently
made much of the fact that it has been proclaimed as a middle-income country.
The economy is doing well, the government is stable – President Mahama has
recently laid down strict guidance on ethical behavior for all those in public
office. So although there is still plenty of poverty and the ‘core poor’ make
up a good proportion of the population, there area signs that overall Ghana is
‘doing well’. The emergence of a larger middle class, those who are in salaried
jobs, and moreover, have not joined the exodus of well-educated Ghanaians that
characterized the brain drain of recent decades, has changed the face of Ghana.
There are now classes who, freed from the precariousness of everyday life, are
able to envision a future, to plan, to save, and to enjoy aspects of life
enjoyed by the leisured classes in other countries. There are new shopping
malls, and the first mall has opened in Ho. Ghana is going through both an
epidemiological transition as well as a demographic one, as these more affluent
families plan for fewer children.
Much has also been made of the emergence of
non-communicable disease in sub-Saharan Africa. It’s debatable how long these
health problems have been around, as they are not particularly well documented,
but certainly in West Africa, heart disease, hypertension, cancer and diabetes
are prominent in the media. In one newspaper, Hajia Mary Salifu Boforo, MP for
Savelugu and Chair of the Women’s Caucus, is reported discussing Breast Cancer
Awareness Month in October, and she described the discrimination faced by women
diagnosed with breast cancer, and that it’s still seen as a source of shame.
She said that over 20% of women face divorce shortly after diagnosis. There are
many issues to overcome before a full screening programme can be established,
and we all know that breast cancer caught early stands a much better outcome.
Sodzi Sodzi-Tettey had a full-page article
in the Daily Graphic on November 9th calling for more integrated
health programmes to tackle diabetes, obesity, hypertension and cancers. In a
well written and thought provoking article, he refers to a recent paper in the
BMJ by Patricio Marquez and Jill Farrington on how communicable and
non-communicable diseases can be tackled alongside each other in those
countries where both need tackling. It’s interesting to me that an article in
one of the world’s top medical journals has been picked up and translated into
a useful piece of health education in a daily newspaper in Ghana. For the article in the BMJ, see: http://www.bmj.com/content/345/bmj.e5812
These kinds of disease often run alongside
the trappings of a westernized lifestyle, and not all of its characteristics
are to be welcomed. There can be a reduction in overall life satisfaction and
happiness – does being able to shop in a new mall really bring greater well-being?
Maybe it does, but countries like Ghana are clearly on the cusp of needing to
think about what kind of priorities it wants, how to retain its strong Ghanaian,
African identity in a globalizing world, and what well-being means in the
twenty first century. As Kwame Nkrumah said so many years ago, “We shall measure our progress by the
improvement in the health of our people. The welfare of our people is our chief
pride, and it is by this that we ask to be judged.”
Sustainability is an obvious concept to
arise in a global South context, and together with the paradigm drift that
we’re witnessing, into ‘well-being’ alongside ‘health’, the obvious question to
raise is: how can Ghana continue on a path of sustainable well-being for all of its citizens?