Visit to our partner country Ghana

Miriam Rossmerkel was accompanied by the two migration researchers Prof. Dr Uwe Hunger and Anja Chrzanowska (Fulda University of Applied Sciences), who are currently evaluating KAAD's Sur Place programme.

After a short stay in Accra, where the focus was on visits to the newly opened Ghanaian European Centre for Jobs, Migration and Development and the German Embassy, the trip continued to Kumasi to the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), which is the second largest university in the country with 80,000 students. Most of KAAD's Sur Place scholarship holders in Ghana can also be found there; the university is also the employer of many KAAD alumni. During their two-day stay, Miriam Rossmerkel, Uwe Hunger and Anja Chrzanowska met with the KAAD's partner committee in Ghana and visited the university's International Programme Office to stay informed about the internationalization and current partner structures of the KNUST. In addition, the group visited the Faculty of Arts at KNUST, where several Sur Place scholarship holders from KAAD have already studied, and took the opportunity to attend the graduation ceremony of KAAD Third Country Scholarship holder Irene Piloya from Uganda, who had just completed her Master's degree in Fine Art at KNUST.

The group then travelled with the alumni and scholarship holders from Kumasi to Sunyani for the seminar of the KAAD-Association of Scholars in West Africa. There are three groups within this association of scholars, each of which organizes its own seminar each year. The annual national seminar organized by KASWA is therefore a highlight, as alumni and scholarship holders from all over Ghana travel to the event. Around sixty members took part in this KASWA seminar on the topic of "Migration in the Health Care Sector". This made the seminar the largest self-organized seminar in the history of KASWA.

The event introduced the topic in depth with a lecture by Prof. Dr. Uwe Hunger on migration movements among academics. The following lecture by Prof. Dr Felix Achana from Northern Ghana on migration in and out of the healthcare sector in Ghana showed the enormous topicality and relevance of the topic for the country: More Ghanaian nurses are currently working in the state healthcare system in the UK alone than in the entire Ghanaian healthcare sector. In addition, seventy per cent of Ghanaian medical graduates stated in surveys that they wanted to leave the country.  This enormous pressure on the already weak Ghanaian healthcare system was further analyzed, discussed and debated in the plenary session. Attempts were also made to identify possible solutions, such as reducing the high discrepancy between national and international wages or intensifying other pull factors.

In the afternoon, the group went on an excursion to the city of Sunyani, where the programme included a guided tour of the Catholic University of Ghana (CUCG) as well as a visit to the large basilica and the Brotherhood of the Salesians of Don Bosco. After an evening mass and a joint conclusion of the seminar in the evening, the participants left early the next morning for their often very distant homelands.

Anja Chrzanokswa, Uwe Hunger and Miriam Rossmerkel also travelled to the distant town of Tamale in northern Ghana. First on the programme was a visit to the University of Development Studies, the largest university in northern Ghana and the workplace of several KAAD alumni. Together with KAAD alumnus and Chairman of KASWA, Prof. Dr Martin Adokiya, they visited various faculties, the library and the IT rooms of the university in order to get to know the reality of life for students in northern Ghana better. Furthermore, a meeting was held with representatives of the Diocese of Tamale, the Vicar General Rev. Fr. Hillary Pogbeyir and the coordinator of the third-party scholarship programme of the Diocese of Münster for northern Ghana, Peter Yang-Bio. The possibilities and opportunities of the programme, which is partly financed by the Diocese of Münster, were discussed, which enables KAAD to provide more Master and PhD scholarships for students from the hitherto structurally weaker north of Ghana.

After a short visit to the 'RedClay' art studio of the ambitious KNUST alumnus, Ibrahim Muhamma, the trip ended back in Accra, the capital in the south of the country.

Before returning to Germany, the trio was able to gain an insight into the highly topical project of KAAD alumnus Dr Vincent Kyere in Accra. He runs a recycling project in Agbogbloshie, a district of Accra with the world's largest informal rubbish dump for electronic waste from all over the world, where an estimated 18,000 people engage in 'urban mining' under highly precarious conditions. The project tries to better the situation by buying the secondary raw materials obtained from the electronic waste from the collectors and then having them processed by official recycling companies in Accra in a professional and environmentally friendly manner. This prevents the collectors from burning or otherwise reprocessing materials such as cables, batteries and plastic in circumstances that are harmful to health and the environment, thus helping to improve the lives of the people living there in a very tangible and direct way.

This trip gave all travelers exciting insights into the fruitful work of KAAD in Ghana, the high level of commitment of alumni and Sur Place students on site and deepened cooperation with old and new partners.