Environmental Education

Education Clubs

During the dry season, groups of children in Northern Ghana commonly skip school for the excitement of setting fire to the scrub and watching the blaze roar through large tracts of vegetation. As small animals rush out, they are clubbed to death, with the meaty, tasty Grasscutter Thryonomys swinderianus being especially prized. Though many of these children live within only fourteen kilometres of Mole National Park, few had actually visited before A Rocha Ghana began leading members of its sixteen primary and junior high environmental education clubs on tours in 2005. To date, 900 out of 1500 club members have been taken through the savannah lands of Mole, exploring the vegetation and encountering wild Elephants Loxodonta africana, antelopes, monkeys and the like. Besides these safari walks, additional club activities have included community clean ups, environmental quiz bowls, recycled art competitions, drama presentations, and football tournaments between A Rocha member schools.

In all of this, Daryl Bosu, project manager at A Rocha Ghana’s northern office, aims to stop the bush burning and instil in the children a desire to understand and protect their unique but fragile ecosystem. Plans are currently underway to extend the environmental education program to 23 more communities and involve all schools in establishing wood lots. Further, A Rocha Ghana is working towards the creation of a “Conservation Education Trust Fund” to provide long-term ecological education support for schools in these communities on the fringes of Mole.

By promoting environmental awareness in young people, it is hoped that the generation-to-generation cycle of unsustainable resource utilization will be stopped. A grant from the British High Commission in Ghana marks the beginning of this effort and part of the funds are currently being used to enhance the Mole Museum and rehabilitate the Wildlife School into an Interactive Learning Centre, through close cooperation with Mole Park Management.

Scholarship Award Scheme

On 17th October 2005 A Rocha Ghana held a ceremony for the first recipients of the Mrs Olene Marie Powell Scholarship Award. Two boys and two girls were selected for this honour on the basis of high academic achievement in the village schools of Murugu and Mognore. The scholarship package included a school uniform, school bag, pens, pencils, erasers, exercise books, math sets, rulers, and text books through completion of their primary school years. As the majority of students in the Murugu and Mognore areas outside Mole National Park do not own decent school attire, the provision of such basic tools is vitally important to the quality of educational experience for these children—if fees are paid but basic kits are lacking, how can high achievement be expected? It is hoped that through such investment in education, A Rocha Ghana will encourage and facilitate the development of an environmentally conscious new generation.