After a 3-year break, Impact Week is finally returning to Accra. The city is not only the capital of Ghana, but also the administrative, economic, and educational centre of Ghana.
Together with Heritage Christian College (HCC), we will welcome around 40 junior coaches - made up of local and international professionals - and approximately 125 local university student participants. HCC is a young institute of higher learning, at the heart of which lies entrepreneurship, ethics and philanthropy, and global competence.
“HCC is the first university ever to approach Impact Week and not Impact Week approaching the university. That is the perfect insight into how high the motivation of HCC staff is. Focussing a lot on entrepreneurial thinking and their idea to train their students best to be prepared for a future in Ghana’s very challenging labour market, we feel like HCC and IW are the perfect fit.”
- Cornelia Garmann, Co-Lead Organizer Impact Week Ghana 2022
What awaits our Coaches and participants?
After receiving a 3-day intensive training, our junior coaches - guided by senior coaches and a lead coach - will guide participants through the Design Thinking Process to find solutions to some of Ghana’s most pressing challenges.
While Ghana is famous for its incredibly diverse flora and fauna, beautiful sandy beaches, and rich history, the country struggles with several social, economic and political challenges.
This year’s Impact Week in Accra will seek for solutions for seven key topics:
Female empowerment: Ghana is working on improving gender equality by granting maternity leave in the corporate environment and increasing the number of women in parliament. However, there is still a way to go until equality is achieved, and girls and women are empowered to pursue their goals and be able to influence social change.
Youth unemployment: With an all-time high youth unemployment rate of 13.4% - almost triple of the 5.3% recorded a decade ago - this translates to 1.55 million out of the 11.54 million economically active population. Although the country is attempting to invest in programs to increase youth employment, a lack of data and guidance on how to improve these programs, irregular funding, and a lack of monitoring has led to low success rates.
Sustainability: In partnership with the UN, Ghana is working toward achieving the 17 sustainable development goals, addressing challenges faced by the people of Ghana and the entire world. The goals are an interconnected global call-to-action to end poverty protect the environment and climate, and ensure that people in Ghana and around the world can live peaceful and prosperous lives.
Agriculture: Ghana is rich in natural resources, and crops including yams, grains, cocoa, oil palms, kola nuts and timber form the base of agriculture in the country’s economy. However, the agricultural sector faces several major challenges, such as an aging workforce and inability to attract younger generations to the sector, land degradation, high transportation costs, and lack of infrastructure.
Sanitation: Only 15% of Ghanaians have access to sanitation facilities and services. This lack of sanitation and hygiene facilities has many negative consequences on the health and wellbeing of the population. Many of the challenges around sanitation are linked to the inability to create proper disposal points for solid waste, lack of enforcement of sanitation laws, growth in population, poor funding, and lack of infrastructure.
Entrepreneurship: Governments in emerging economies, such as Ghana, struggle due to budgetary restrictions. Investments cannot be made to simultaneously solve all of the country’s challenges. To help improve these emerging economies, social enterprises are called for to bridge the divide between public and private sectors and provide sustainable solutions.
IT security: Although Ghana not only has a reputation as one of the most cyber-secure countries in Africa, but the whole world, cybercrime still costs the country tens of millions of dollars each year. Around 60% of these losses can be attributed to crimes committed against individuals, micro and small businesses, and the remaining 40% due to losses through attacks on banks. As the world becomes more dependent on technology - accelerated substantially by the recent pandemic - these losses are steadily increasing.
We look forward to visiting Accra and working together with local professors and students to tackle some of the country’s most pressing challenges. Keep an eye out on our blog page and social channels to follow our journey to Ghana and find out more about the solutions.
Sources:
https://www.britannica.com/place/Accra
https://yali.state.gov/empowering-women-in-ghana-through-the-womanempowered-network/
https://www.theafricareport.com/187529/ghana-will-new-government-plan-break-curse-of-failed-employment-programmes/
https://www.wvi.org/blogpost/scaling-sanitation-coverage-ghana-0