Success Stories
Community Support Teacher Starts School from Scratch
Tandawura Aburo’s village is not far from Kojope, roughly ten kilometers from Damongo, the district capital of West Gonja District in the Northern Region of Ghana. Kojope is a tiny settlement with a modest school building, but no school — unless the building without teachers or students could be called a school. Most children in Kojope did not go to school.
A few years ago, Tandawura, an elementary school graduate, could not find any work in his village of Busunu. “I had no work, and no hope of going to school again,” commented Tandawura. But after attending a Community Support Teacher workshop, Tandawura became eager to become a volunteer teacher. The EQUALL staff encouraged him to restart the school in Kojope. He readily agreed: “I thought volunteering would be helping.”
But how did he survive? Tandawura says he tried doing some petty trading and a little farming. “Besides, I am a musician. I make my own music productions, and I sell them,” he adds. He goes to Accra, Ghana’s capital city, to record and is already on his fourth album.
In September 2004, he literally started the school from scratch. “Today,” he says, “we have classes 1 to 3, and we need help to construct class 4.” The school is flourishing with both students and teachers. The District Assembly enlisted people from the National Youth Employment Program to teach in the school and the Ghana Education Service has assigned a head teacher to the school.
Tandawura is overjoyed. He himself has the opportunity to continue his schooling with support from another EQUALL program, Open and Distance Learning. He has enrolled for a diploma and will become a certified teacher in a couple of years.
But will Tandawura return to his roots after he is a qualified teacher? “How can I leave Kojope,” he says, “I love them in my heart.”
