What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [37]
WomensTrust also facilitated a program created by Hannah Davis, a twenty-year-old junior at New York University, who started the Ghana Literacy Project in Pokuase in 2007 to teach critical thinking skills to junior high school students. Its first project, funded by Davis’s grandfather and his Rotary club in Rhode Island and called the Girls Exploration and Empowerment Club (GEEC), supplements the rote-style education of the public school system with Saturday morning programs of self-exploration, science experiments, computer and writing skills, and a theater program. “The heartbeat of WomensTrust is education, and if we were to invest in one area for maximum impact, it would be to keep girls in school,” Dana says.
WomensTrust’s success stories are amazing. One woman, Theresa Appia Amponosh, started out with a $55 loan and, by 2008, worked her way up to a $3,000 loan, the largest given so far to an individual, from WomensTrust’s Entrepreneurs Club. Amponosh, who worked hammering stone in the local quarry for a couple of dollars a day in earlier years, founded the private Celestial Light School. Her students pay forty pasewas, or about forty cents, a day for school and lunch. The loans from WomensTrust have allowed her to purchase rice, oil, fish, and other foodstuff in bulk so that she no longer has to shop at the market each day to make meals for the children.
“Until WomensTrust, if you go to the bank, nobody give you a loan,” she said by phone. “If you go to the moneylender, nobody give you a loan. But WomensTrust gives us help so we can help yourself and do something for our families. WomensTrust helps us raise our level in society.”
At Dana’s request, Amponosh has agreed to serve as one of three Ghanaian members of WomensTrust’s board of directors, an important step WomensTrust is taking. It is a move, along with an ongoing effort to shift program management from Wilmot Flat to Pokuase, Dana hopes will improve the WomensTrust’s sustainability. Amponosh said she agreed to serve on the board, after consulting with her husband, because WomensTrust is not a political organization and because of Dana. “She is a friend to Pokuase and well loved. She’s not here for herself. She could stay in America and enjoy her life, but she chooses to come here. If we had five women like her in every district, we would have no poverty in Ghana. She is a very hardworking, dynamic, and unique woman. She is white, but she is one of us!”
It is just that hands-on, bottom-up, on-the-ground approach that has led William Easterly, one of the toughest United States critics of foreign aid to sing Dana’s praises. A former World Bank economist and the author of The White Man’s: Burden Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good, Easterly says that throwing $2.3 trillion of Western aid at African poverty over fifty years, between 1955 and 2005, achieved virtually no economic growth. The West’s assumptions about what was needed were key to the failure to help. “It’s like a Greek tragedy of hubris and arrogance. We thought we knew the answers to Africa’s problems in advance,” he said at a WomensTrust fund-raiser in Manhattan in September 2009. “We might be better off doing what Dana did in Pokuase. You go and you get to know the people. You gain their trust, not for paternalistic purposes. You go with the intention of finding out how we can help. That’s why Women’sTrust is probably the best project I have seen in Africa.” Not long before her sixty-sixth birthday, Dana wandered through the farmer’s market in Wilmot Flat one morning. She luxuriated in the first crisp hints of autumn air and lingered in pleasant conversations at the farm stands long enough to make her a little late for an appointment. There were women selling hand-spun yarn, hand-crafted satchels, beeswax candles, jars