What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [35]
On that trip, Dana also discovered why so many young girls were not in school during the day: only 20 percent made it to sixth grade. This is terrible. The loan program will never work unless we keep girls in school, Dana told herself. Shortly after she returned to the United States, she read a report issued by the Council on Foreign Relations titled “What Works in Girls’ Education” that validated her fears. The report, introduced by Hillary Rodham Clinton, a longtime advocate for expanding girls’ access to education around the world, cited extensive evidence of the beneficial impact of educating girls in developing countries. “I was shocked,” Dana said. “When you educate girls, every indicator—economic, nutrition, birthrate—improved. Why hasn’t our country put money into this simple act? Why did the World Bank come in years ago and say to the countries, ‘You’re going bankrupt, you’re going to have to charge for schools,’ leading to girls being pulled out of schools by their families? It was too much. I had to do something.”
On her next trip to Pokuase, she walked unannounced into an elementary school she frequently passed and ran into a senior teacher named Emma Eshun. She led Dana to the head administrator’s office and then stayed to listen as Dana explained her concern. She told the administrator she would like to start a scholarship program to retain promising girls at risk of being taken out of school by their families. By the time school started the next fall, Eshun had been made the school’s principal, and WomensTrust gave its first scholarships to eleven girls. In keeping with WomensTrust’s insistence on accountability, students must maintain a minimum of a 2.5 grade point average. By 2009, 120 primary and secondary students were receiving scholarships. And one scholarship recipient had graduated from high school, a spectacular accomplishment, and gone on to receive training as a birthing expert. “She is a total success story,” Dana said enthusiastically.
As her organization reached its second anniversary, Dana was struggling to balance her work and her nonprofit. She hired Susan Kraeger, a fifty-nine-year-old local woman with a strong background in fund-raising, to become her executive director. They traveled together to Ghana and began to analyze what was happening with the program. They found that repayment rates were falling and that the number of loans being approved had dropped by half. There were two reasons: the Badoes had abandoned the all-important group-loan protocol, and, as Dana recognized, it was critically important to have a native of Pokuase, whose life was woven into the fabric of the community, administering the loans. Dana fired the Badoes, who lived apart from the village, and hired Gertrude Ankrah, a former schoolteacher and bank clerk, who had grown up in Pokuase. She had post-secondary school education, political ambitions, and her mother owned a bakery in town.
As a result, the number of women recruited to participate in the micro-lending program increased tenfold and the rate of repayment has soared to 85 percent. Many in Pokuase still don’t understand Dana’s purpose in coming to the village, and some believe because she is white and used to stay at the Topido, she must be the Dutch innkeeper’s wife. Gertrude herself did not fully appreciate Dana’s commitment until she made the daylong flight across the Atlantic Ocean from Accra to Boston to attend a micro-finance conference. “You really must have the passion to help to travel like this and do it again and again. It showed me Dana really meant what she said,” Gertrude said.
Collaboration is the bedrock of Dana’s work in Pokuase. She has a formidable but welcoming persona. But her greatest asset may be that she