IK Notes Literacy and Local Governance in a Rural Community: The Experience of Nwodua, Ghana wodua is a small town of 640 resi- Making literacy work N dents located 20 km from the city of Tamale in northern Ghana, and The first teacher soon left to attend 3 km by what was previously a dirt path Teacher Training School and get a bet- from the Tamale-Kumbungu highway. ter job. His two students simply re- Until the early 1980s, Nwodua re- cruited another in his place and man- mained largely cut off from regional aged at the same time to bring some of commerce and had few community fa- the dropouts back into the fold. They cilities and no schools. The route link- used this moderate success as leverage ing Nwodua to the highway is now to convince the Bishopric of the Catho- paved, and the town has a pipe-borne lic Church to establish a primary water system. The community also fea- school in Nwodua in 1984. Two years tures a tree nursery, two grinding mills later, both were able to pass the na- that produce weaning food for infants, tional literacy test and qualify to open a primary school, an adult vocational their own literacy centers in the imme- training center, much-increased agri- diate vicinity. cultural production and an innovative Their success in the effort led to fur- mode of community governance. This ther responsibility and opportunity. last accomplishment may be a, if not The two were chosen as field supervi- the, key to all the others. sors by the new Dagbani Functional Lit- In 1979, an illiterate farmer from eracy Project just then getting under Nwodua decided that it was time to way and soon had seventy-six classes bring instruction in the ways of modern going in communities throughout the Ghana to his community. He started by region. By virtue of its role as literacy No. 7 convincing a middle school leaver from April 1999 a nearby village to come develop lit- eracy in Nwodua. Instruction was given IK Notes reports periodically on Indig- in the mother tongue, which did not enous Knowledge (IK) initiatives in satisfy most of the young people re- Sub-Saharan Africa. It is published by the Africa Region’s Knowledge and cruited. They wanted English and Learning Center as part of an evolving dropped out. But the farmer respon- IK partnership between the World Bank, communities, NGOs, develop- sible for getting the program going and ment institutions and multilateral orga- a close friend persisted, remunerating nizations. The views expressed in this the teacher by working on his fields article are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the World World Bank when they could offer him no salary. Bank Group or its partners in this ini- tiative. A webpage on IK is available at http://www.worldbank.org/aftdr/ik/ default.htm 2 headquarters for the region, Nwodua was able to open in Restoring the environment 1989 a full-scale Adult Primary School where more than fifty residents of the community succeeded during the following The next initiative was in the area of agro-forestry and like- years in getting their primary leaving certificate, some con- wise stemmed from lessons learned and topics explored in tinuing on to secondary education . At the same time, the lit- the literacy and Adult Primary Education centers. Five par- eracy effort increasingly became the fulcrum for a whole se- ticipants attended a UNDP-sponsored seminar in Tamale on ries of local development activities. the problems of desertification in northern Ghana and what First among these was the establishment of a Primary local communities could do in the way of reforestation. On Health Care Committee, which sent a team of residents for their return to Nwodua, they convinced a critical mass of training with the National Health Service in Tamale and their co-residents to undertake the establishment of a nurs- thereafter sponsored campaigns to eliminate malnutrition ery for tree seedlings. Though all the groundwork was accom- and childhood convulsions. These efforts attracted attention plished in 1991 and 1992, it soon became evident that the from Unicef, which assisted the Committee in establishing a initiative would fail from water scarcity if a way were not grinding mill to prepare weaning mixture for infants. The found to bring more water to the community. Committee made sure at the same time that proceeds from The Nwodua Young Farmers’ Club enlisted the leadership rental of the mill and sale of its products paid for a second of the Dagbani Literacy Program in approaching UNDP with a unit,thus launching the community towards a self-sustaining proposal for extending the water pipelines supplying Tamale food processing industry. to Nwodua itself, a distance of about 5 km. UNDP agreed to underwrite the effort and the villagers dug 5 km of trenches to prepare the way. The hookup was successful and the Nwodua Water Committee manages to pay monthly fees from IK Notes would be of interest to: the Sewerage Commission by levying fees on each household in the village using water. At the same time, water availability removed the main bottleneck to the development of the Nwodua nursery and reforestation effort. The nursery began Name distributing seedlings of a variety of commercial and shade trees to Nwodua residents free of charge and selling them to Institution outsiders. In 1995, for example, more than 2000 grafted mango and 4000 cashew seedlings were placed with groups Address and individuals throughout the immediate region, including institutions like the Kumbungu Sub-district Assembly. The nursery now has a growing capital fund for the initiation of new projects. This increased commerce with the exterior made it im- Letters, comments, and requests for publications perative to upgrade the track leading from Nwodua to the should be addressed to: Tamale road. A Road Committee was formed in 1991 and by Editor: IK Notes the following year World Bank officials had been approached Knowledge and Learning Center and convinced to support construction of a motorable road Africa Region, World Bank 1818 H Street, N.W., Room J5-171 over the 3 km link, provided that the village would furnish Washington, D.C. 20433 manual labor and board for the specialized workers and tech- E-mail: pmohan@worldbank.org nicians sent in to work on the job. The road was successfully completed the following year and the Road Committee made 3 responsible for its maintenance and for planning new im- all responsibility for ensuring orderly implementation of the provements to access routes. projects and preservation of community interest. This group in turn has established the working committees that take Starting with adults care of each of the sectors of local development and report back to it. The GDC is chaired by a sixty-five year-old illiterate The ease in exporting products from Nwodua meant also ease farmer well respected in the community, but of the other in accessing it, and the community began, in a series of ways eight members only one is over forty-five and seven are gradu- to play a role as hub of extension activities in its immediate ates of literacy or adult primary school classes. region. An additional one was the constitution in 1999 of an The GDC works through eight sectoral committees, one impressive vocational-technical center funded by Danish for- each for adult literacy, primary health care, food processing, eign aid. With its advent, the village boasted quite a cluster of agro-forestry, vocational instruction, agricultural training educational facilities – three for adults (the literacy center, and road construction/maintenance. In the process of devel- the Adult Primary School and the Vocational-Technical Cen- oping this networked structure of oversight, two things have ter) flanking a more modest public elementary school for happened. First, the sustainability of initiatives has been vir- children. tually ensured by this monitoring and sponsorship mecha- The Nwodua Development Committees are frequently nism. Second, by incremental steps, the GDC has become the asked why their educational program thus far seems to have operational village government in Nwodua – though not the given more importance to adults than to children. Their re- ceremonial one – and has succeeded in creating an environ- sponse is simple: It’s the best way to go in previously poor ment that both facilitates local entrepreneurial initiative and rural communities like ours. If more adults start encounter- is supportive of improved public service delivery. ing new opportunity and learning how to benefit from it, But the success of the GDC must in turn be traced back to more will be eager to send their children to primary school. two other factors – on the one hand, the rich stimulus for change created by the succession of adult training and non- Renewed governance at the core formal education sessions held in and around the village; and, on the other, the driving force furnished by the two previously As remarkable as these diverse efforts are, the heart of inno- illiterate residents who started the whole process almost vation at Nwodua lies at their core – in the renewed form of twenty years ago and refused to be defeated by obstacles. In- community governance gradually elaborated by village au- dividual initiative plus the continuing availability of new thorities and the young participants in the new initiatives to training and opportunities to apply it provided the fuel for provide a basis for managing and extending their activities. successes in local development that seemed impossible The initial leaders of the literacy movement sought concur- twenty years ago. But the invention of new forms of local gov- rence from the traditional chief of Nwodua and his council to ernance furnished a framework without which none of this set up a General Development Committee (GDC) with over- might have come to pass. This article was written on the basis of research conducted by Ghanaian, Canadian and American investigators with the support and technical supervision of Peter Easton, Associate Professor, Graduate Studies in Adult Education, Florida State University. Funding was supplied by the Club du Sahel/OECD, the CILSS and the Association for the Development of Adult Education in Africa (ADEA).