Category Archives: Ghana

‘Do not let this fire burn’: WHO warns Europe over coronavirus

Posted on by

Europe now centre of pandemic, says WHO, as Spain prepares for state of emergency

The World Health Organization has stepped up its calls for intensified action to fight the coronavirus pandemic, imploring countries “not to let this fire burn”, as Spain said it would declare a 15-day state of emergency from Saturday.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO director general, said Europe – where the virus is present in all 27 EU states and has infected 25,000 people – had become the centre of the epidemic, with more reported cases and deaths than the rest of the world combined apart from China.

Continue reading...

‘All we can offer is the chain’: the scandal of Ghana’s shackled sick

Posted on by

For the families of Ghanaians with mental health or substance abuse issues, shackling their loved ones can seem the only option, as faith healers compete to fill the mental health void

All photographs by Robin Hammond

Under the baobab tree two goats are tethered to the great trunk by ropes. Baba Agunga, a man in his twenties, is held by chains. A bracelet shackle round each of his ankles leads to a chain rusted to the same tone as the Ghanaian mud and welded tight around a thick, solid tree root.

He sits naked on a cloth, hugging thin legs, his skin dusty dry and his eyes vacant. He has been there for three years says his mother, Aniah Agunga.

Continue reading...

Fraud fighters and bamboo bikes: the African innovators driving change

Posted on by

Software for fighting cybercrime in Ghana and tools for speeding up cervical cancer diagnosis in Uganda are among innovations recognised by the judges of this year’s Africa prize

The Royal Academy of Engineering’s Africa prize, now in its sixth year, is the continent’s biggest award for engineering innovation. Sixteen African inventors from six countries – including, for the first time, Malawi – have been shortlisted to receive funding, training and mentoring for projects intended to revolutionise sectors ranging from agriculture and banking to women’s health. The winner will be awarded £25,000 and the three runners-up will receive £10,000 each.

This year’s inventions include facial recognition software to prevent financial fraud, a low-cost digital microscope to speed up cervical cancer diagnosis, and two separate innovations made from water hyacinth plants. Four inventors spoke to the Guardian about their innovations and their plans to change Africa for the better.

Continue reading...

The vanishing: Ghana’s defenders face new perils in fight against overfishing

Posted on by

Illegal fishing by Chinese-owned trawlers is costing the country millions – and one of the officials trying to stop it has now been missing for months

In his cramped living room in an Accra backstreet, Bernard Essien pulls out a sheet of paper – a statement signed by his elder brother Emmanuel and addressed to the Ghanaian police. Two weeks before 28-year-old Emmanuel vanished at sea, his handwritten account and accompanying video footage alleged illegal fishing by a trawler he had been working on. If the allegation was proved true, the ship’s captain faced a minimum fine of $1m.

Emmanuel Essien was a fishing observer, one of Ghana’s frontline defenders against an overfishing crisis that is among the worst in west Africa. Illegal and destructive practices by foreign-owned trawlers are draining the Ghanaian economy of an estimated £50m a year. Along its 350-mile coastline, overfishing has driven small pelagic species known as “people’s fish”, the staple diet, to the verge of collapse.

Continue reading...

Dr Fred Sai obituary

Posted on by
Campaigner for reproductive rights and health in the developing world

The harrowing experiences that Fred Sai faced as a young medical officer in Ghana in the 1960s fuelled his concern about the link between frequent childbearing and preventable death and sickness in mothers and children, and turned him into a passionate campaigner for reproductive rights and health in the developing world.

In his early clinical work, Sai, who has died aged 95, came across many children with protein-energy malnutrition, or kwashiorkor, which in the language of the Ga ethnic group to which he belonged means “the disease of the displaced child”. “I realised that fully a third of my child patients had mothers who were pregnant or had a young sibling born very soon after them,” he told the Lancet in 2012. “The abrupt stopping of breastfeeding was making them sick. I thought that one way to help these women was to teach them family planning and the importance of spacing children properly.”

Continue reading...

The Fairtrade mark is still trustworthy | Letter

Posted on by
Joy and Richard Webb respond to recent negative coverage about the fair trade movement

As committed and hardworking supporters of fair trade for almost 30 years, we feel your correspondents (Letters, 27 July) missed the point of “The death of fair trade?” (The long read, 23 July) which showed how large corporations are trying to circumvent fair trade and undermine the highly successful Fairtrade mark with their own “fairly traded” and the like. Rest assured, the Fairtrade mark remains an absolutely trustworthy guarantee of internationally agreed standards.

Tim Gossling blames the EU for “not allowing” the production of Divine chocolate in Ghana. This is not true. The EU is primarily a trading bloc, it imposes tariffs on products from outside that bloc. That’s what trading blocs do. It benefits UK manufacturers and farmers, too. No wonder the TUC, CBI and NFU are all appalled at the thought of similar tariffs being slapped on our products after Brexit.

Continue reading...

Unsavoury truths about fair trade | Letters

Posted on by
Tim Gossling and Bob Caldwell advise checking the smallprint and question how trustworthy the movement is

The death of fair trade (Journal, 23 July) can partly be laid at the door of the EU. Its treatment of former colonies, restricting tariff-free trade to “primary produce” so that the profitable part of the businesses, manufacture, is protected, means that they may be independent in terms of politics, but are economically still the same colonies.

Take Ghana, which Samanth Subramanian mentions. Go and buy your bar of “Fairtrade” Divine chocolate. On the back it waxes lyrical about Kuapa Kokoo, the cocoa farmers’ organisation that tries to guarantee fair and stable prices for cocoa beans, with a bit extra for the social premium. Read to the end of the small print where it says: “Made in Germany”. Ghana has a perfectly good chocolate factory, at the port town of Tema, but workers only make chocolate for the local market, because that is all they are allowed to do. Ghana would be a lot richer if it could sell the manufactured product over here, but that would be in direct competition with the German manufacturer, which the EU is formed to protect. That is why I voted leave in the referendum – though I probably would not do so again, as Brexit is unlikely to improve the situation.
Tim Gossling
Cambridge

Continue reading...

‘People think I’m very odd’: how Ibrahim Mahama brought Ghana’s past to Manchester

Posted on by

From second-hand train seats to old school cupboards, the artist has transported discarded objects from his west African homeland to create a ‘parliament of ghosts’

‘We’re haunted all the time by ghosts of the past,” says Ibrahim Mahama as we sit on dirty old plastic second-class Ghana Railways carriage seats in Manchester’s Whitworth Art Gallery. Even these seats from an abandoned railway? “Especially these,” he says, smiling.

Mahama, a junkyard utopian whose art involves recycling stuff that’s lost its purpose, bought up rows and rows of these seats. He packed them into shipping containers and sent them on a 5,000-mile trip, from his west African homeland to the Whitworth, along with some school cupboards no longer fit for purpose, exercise books of children now grown up, and the minutes of Ghanaian parliamentary debates now deemed obsolete.

Continue reading...

Two Canadian women abducted in Ghana rescued by security forces

Posted on by

Eight people arrested in connection with kidnapping of Lauren Tilley and Bailey Chitty, authorities say

Security forces have rescued two Canadian women who were abducted in Ghana earlier this month and arrested eight people in connection with their kidnapping, authorities said on Wednesday.

The pair were named as Lauren Tilley and Bailey Chitty by Youth Challenge International, an international development organisation headquartered in Toronto.

Continue reading...

Two Canadian volunteers missing in rare kidnapping in Ghana

Posted on by

The women were abducted in Kumasi, and security sources have suggested it was a kidnapping for ransom

Two Canadian women who were volunteering with an international development organisation have been abducted in Ghana, a rare attack in a country seen as one of the most secure in the West African region.

The Canadians, who are ages 19 and 20, were taken on Tuesday evening in Kumasi, Ghana’s second city, some 200km (125 miles) north-west of the capital Accra.

Continue reading...

Fight the fakes: how to beat the $200bn medicine counterfeiters | Helen Lock

Posted on by

Armed with blockchain and AI, health workers and campaigners are battling the bogus business that kills thousands

By the time the teenage boy was standing in front of Bernice Bornmai, feverish and delirious, it was already too late.

It wasn’t just the malaria that was killing the 17-year-old, it was the time he’d wasted taking fake medicine. The antimalarials did nothing to stop the disease marching through the young Ghanaian’s body: his organs were already shutting down.

Continue reading...

Ghana shakes up art’s ‘sea of whiteness’ with its first Venice pavilion

Posted on by

In curving galleries designed by David Adjaye, artists are putting Africa firmly on the biennale map

The Venice Art Biennale, the world’s most celebrated international art event, has a history that is inextricably bound up with colonialism.

Its first pavilion for the showcasing of a “national” art was established by Belgium in 1907. Britain followed soon after. European countries remain dominant at the event – at least numerically.

Continue reading...

Vaccines by air as drone medicine service takes off in Ghana

Posted on by

Up to 600 flights expected daily as largest service of its kind in the world targets country’s remote areas

Twelve million people in Ghana are set to benefit from the launch of the world’s largest drone medical delivery service.

Up to 600 drone flights will be made each day, delivering vaccines, blood supplies and life-saving medicines to 2,000 health centres in remote areas around the country.

Continue reading...

‘Death by a thousand cuts’: vast expanse of rainforest lost in 2018

Posted on by

Pristine forests are vital for climate and wildlife but trend of losses is rising, data shows

Millions of hectares of pristine tropical rainforest were destroyed in 2018, according to satellite analysis, with beef, chocolate and palm oil among the main causes.

The forests store huge amounts of carbon and are teeming with wildlife, making their protection critical to stopping runaway climate change and halting a sixth mass extinction. But deforestation is still on an upward trend, the researchers said. Although 2018 losses were lower than in 2016 and 2017, when dry conditions led to large fires, last year was the next worst since 2002, when such records began.

Continue reading...

Rotten eggs: e-waste from Europe poisons Ghana’s food chain

Posted on by

Toxins from old computers, fridges and other electronic goods are polluting chicken eggs in an area where 80,000 people live

Some of the most hazardous chemicals on Earth are entering the food chain in Ghana from illegally disposed electronic waste coming from Europe.

According to a new report by two environmental groups tracking the disposal of e-waste, chicken eggs from the Agbogbloshie slum in Ghana’s capital, Accra – where residents break up waste to recover metals – contain dangerous levels of dioxins and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), among other harmful substances.

Continue reading...

Malawi starts landmark pilot of first ever child malaria vaccine

Posted on by

Immunisation gives partial protection against the killer disease, and lessens the severity of other cases

Malawi will begin immunising young children against malaria today, in a landmark large-scale pilot of the first vaccine to give partial protection against the disease, the World Health Organization said.

Although the vaccine protects only a third of children aged under two years from life-threatening or severe malaria, clinical trials have found those who are immunised are likely to have less severe cases of the disease. Earlier, smaller trials also showed the vaccine prevented four in 10 cases of malaria overall, in babies aged between five and 17 months.

Continue reading...

Ghana: at least 60 dead after two buses collide in Bono East

Posted on by

One of the buses involved in latest collision on Ghana’s roads caught fire, say police

At least 60 people have been killed in a head-on collision between two buses in Ghana, police have said.

The incident – the latest deadly crash on Ghana’s roads – happened on Friday at about 2am local time in the Bono East region, about 270 miles (430km) north of the capital, Accra.

Continue reading...

Afrobeats star Fuse ODG: ‘I love myself now. Africa has done that for me’

Posted on by

When the south London-raised musician visited his home country, Ghana, he fell in love with it. Now, he is building schools and organising festivals there, and calling for others to return and rebuild a nation

It was in 2011 that Fuse ODG had an awakening. Frustrated with his experiences growing up in south London, he decided to take a trip to Ghana, the country of his birth. “I saw a whole new Africa that I had never seen on TV,” he says. “You’re just a human here, you don’t feel like a minority. It feels like home. That’s the energy I got from coming back: peace of mind.”

That trip was a catalyst for what happened next: a string of hit Afrobeats singles that melded old African highlife rhythms with western rap and R&B melodies. Now, the 30-year-old is about to release his second album, New Africa Nation, which comes hand in hand with a vastly more ambitious project: to build schools, bring together communities and change the way Africa is perceived.

Continue reading...