This week, the world will celebrate International Women’s Day, a day designated by the United Nations to raise awareness about women’s contributions and gender equity challenges. In collaboration with our partner communities, in rural Northern Ghana, Engage Globally strives to empower girls and women throughout our programs. Pursuing gender equity, as described in Sustainable Development Goal 5, is a key focus of our work.
 
Unfortunately, the recent Covid pandemic has disproportionately impacted women in developing nations as it has led to school closures, rising food prices, and overwhelmed health systems. Additionally, in our communities, climate change impacts on rainfall and soil health have worsened farming conditions, reduced water supplies and increased malnutrition. 
 
This International Women’s Day, it is especially important to redouble our efforts to pursue gender equity and sustainable development. Below are brief descriptions of some of our efforts.

Four-year old Human starting kindergarten

Education:
There has been great success in global primary school access for girls since the Educational for All movement of the 1990s. Women’s education has many positive effects including improved health and education of their children, raising national GDPs, and reducing birth rates, especially of teenage mothers. Ghana has closed the gender gap for access to primary schools and enrolled many more students over the last 20 years, especially in the more urban southern regions.
 
Unfortunately, in rural regions, providing a quality education is more challenging. In our seven partner communities, there are few primary schools within walking distance and teacher attendance, very high enrollments, and absence of school supplies can make education less effective. Additionally, UNICEF estimated that only about 2.3% of women in the region where we work are able to complete secondary school.
 
For girls, attendance can be impacted by other responsibilities including water gathering, watching siblings, and helping prepare food. Girls may also be impacted by their families inability to purchase required school uniforms and supplies or to pay school testing fees. When they get older, many girls cannot continue in school after they begin to menstruate. Absence of toilets or private sanitation facilities leads to prolonged monthly absences and eventually many girls drop out of school. In some settings, safety issues while traveling to school and gender-based violence in school, are also significant concerns.
 
We know that investing in girls education, has many broad benefits for development. These include:

• Women spend a high percentage of their income on their families, especially on health, education, food, and housing. This multiplier effect creates high levels of return on investment.
• Educated girls are more likely to postpone having children and to wait longer between pregnancies, which generally improves child health and nutrition, as well as raising family incomes. For example, a World Bank study found that in Ghana women with a high school education had on average 2.5 children, while those without had on average six children.
• When more girls attend school, national incomes and gross domestic products rise.

 Five girls joining our scholarship program at their new school.

Salifu training to be a seamstress.

Employment opportunities
In our partner communities, most families work as subsistence farmers. Opportunities for paid employment are rare, and especially so for women. Our vocational training program helps to address this challenge by enrolling about 40 young adults each year, two-thirds of whom are women. Each trainee is paired with a business where they learn a trade for three months to three years. The businesses are paid a fee to provide the training, and each trainee is given the needed tools for their trade, such as a sewing machine. Most trainees also receive a bicycle and funding for a daily meal. Trainees are mentored and families are actively involved in the process to ensure that they are supportive.
 
Upon graduation, most trainees are employed by the business where they trained. But, some are given start-up business grants to open their own small businesses in the local community. This helped to create the first woman-owned small business in one of our partner villages – a seamstress shop – which now trains new seamstresses. The shop also sews all of the uniforms for our early childhood students.  
 
This program increases economic choices for trainees and their families. It has also reduced the migration of young women to urban centers and given them opportunities to remain in their home communities while earning an income. This program is very popular and many more young people have asked to join.

Women’s agriculture and food security
In our partner communities, women conduct much of the farming activities. Farming uses primarily traditional methods such as hand held hoes, hand harvesting, and rain irrigation, as there is no access to clean or running water. Farms are located several kilometers from the villages, and, unfortunately, a significant amount of the harvest is lost due to inability to carry it back to the community before it spoils.
 
The women’s group, of over sixty women representing five villages, identified their number one priority as education of children and their second priority as help with farming. Recognizing that providing women with agricultural assistance can significantly reduce food insecurity, Engage purchased two king motos (motorcycles with carrying beds) so that more produce could be carried more quickly from the farms.
 
Additionally, we have piloted a project with five women to help them expand their personal land plots and to harvest more diverse foods. A tractor was rented to plow (pictured above) and the women received seeds and training on how to diversify their crops. We hope to expand this program to include many more women next year.
 

A young girl participating in our tree planting project. 

​Engage Globally believes that empowering women helps families, communities, and the environment. We hope you will follow us on Facebook and join our mailing list to learn more about our gender equity work! And, please share your thoughts and questions in the comments section.

 
March 3rd is World Wildlife Day! There are many ways that individuals and communities can help wildlife today, and every day. Below are some of our favorites.
 
Contribute to wildlife science through citizen science 
Free apps on our phones allow us to be part of global data collection about wildlife populations and migrations. Our two favorites are apps that anyone with a smart phone can quickly and easily use.

• Cornell e-bird – this app (and website) helps users easily upload observations of birds in your backyards, parks or wherever you travel. Cornell University then collects these observations from over 300,000 global participants to assess bird population abundance, migration patterns, and changes over time. You can see samples of their amazing migration maps here - https://ebird.org/science/status-and-trends/abundance-animations. To help you learn about the birds you are seeing, Cornell offers Merlin, which allows for identification of birds by photo or sound. We love holding up our phones when hiking and having the app tell us all the bird species that we are hearing! https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/  
• I-naturalist – this app enables citizen scientists to identify plants and animals by taking a photo. The collected data helps with understanding locations and populations of wildlife species and their habitats. I-naturalist has a second version of this app, Seek, that is geared towards learning about wildlife and great for environmental education, including badges you can earn. We think of this one as real life Pokemon! 

Photo Credit: Sean Moran

Help wildlife on social media
 
We have all seen those cute videos of talking parrots in someone’s home or the tickling of a slow loris or selfies with a smiling monkey sitting on someone’s shoulder. Sadly, these videos, and any video of a wild animal treated like a pet, contribute to wildlife trafficking and poaching as well as dangerous interactions with animals in the wild. Some people see the videos and think it is okay to buy a wild animal or to pet or hold one when traveling. Social media organizations are working with international organizations like the Coalition to End Wildlife Trafficking Online, WWF and Traffic to stop buying and selling of wild animals and plants on their platforms, but it is challenging.
 
You can help by:

• Never sharing a post with a wild animal being treated like a pet.
• If sharing a post of a wild animal in an AZA certified zoo or a rescue/rehabilitation facility, clearly include that organization’s name and website in your post.
• Avoid liking or commenting on posts and videos of wild animals treated as pets and if the post is by a friend, consider privately encouraging them to delete it.
• Instead, share photos of wild animals in their natural habitats. We love to follow and share some of the global wildlife photography contests like the Comedy Wildlife Awards. 

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Traveling to see wildlife?
 
Wildlife tourism is a large global industry earning over $100 billion and employing over 9 million people. This industry has been significantly impacted by Covid and much needed funding from ecotourism to protect national parks and wildlife has dramatically declined. With fewer rangers and staff, it is especially important that tourists do their best to limit their impacts on wildlife and their habitats, and that we prioritize observation over interaction. We suggest these key strategies:

• Always follow laws about keeping your distance from wild animals. If the rules are not posted, a good rule of thumb is 50+ yards for marine and large land mammals. 
• Stay on trails and do not disturb plants or soil
• Remove all of your own trash and, if safely possible, remove any trash that you encounter
• Watch your noise levels around wild animals, especially in breeding locations
• Be careful of lights, cell phones, and photography at night as this can disrupt behaviors like breeding, egg laying, and hibernation
• Try to avoid hotels and tourism programs that have caged wild animals or that ask you to take a selfie with a wild animal  
• Look for tour programs with wildlife certifications and read about your tours and hotels to check that they follow ethical standards         

​Photo Credit: Sean Moran

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Volunteer to help wildlife

• Volunteer for park, river and beach clean-ups to help reduce trash and remove invasive species from habitats
• Join community organizations that support tree planting to help raise the trees, distribute them, plant them, or monitor their growth
• Many local communities have wildlife rescue centers which need volunteers both to care for animals and to transport them between rescue facilities
• National Parks, State Parks, AZA certified zoos and aquariums, and wildlife rehabilitation centers all typically offer volunteer experiences
• Keep in mind that there are many volunteer needs that can be done from your home – like helping with publications, website design, advocacy, fundraising, and community outreach

 
Give wildlife friendly gifts for holidays and birthdays
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Wildlife-friendly gifts can support wildlife organizations, increase environmental education, and reduce consumption. Here are three of our favorites.

• National Parks Pass
• Membership to the Smithsonian Zoo – a global leader in conserving endangered species in ‘arks’ or ‘reserve populations’
• Symbolically adopt a wild animal with the World Wildlife Fund
• Need a gift for a child? Try digital versions of environmental education magazines from National Geographic or NWF. 

 
 
As you think about how you can help wildlife today, and every day, we encourage you to keep learning and to stay hopeful by remembering Dr. Jane Goodall’s words, “Every individual matters… Every individual makes a difference.” We hope you will share how you are making a difference for wildlife and your suggestions for additions to this blog in the comments below.