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>>>HOME: PROGRAMS: Health, Education and Partner Programs
PARTNER PROGRAMS
GHEI recruits volunteers to develop projects that are requested by the community which may be self-contained rather than ongoing. In this endeavour, GHEI pursues collaborations with organizations that provide special services or skills to the community.
GHEI worked with Cornell’s Cover Africa student organization on a project in neighbouring village Surano. The two groups of students concentrated on learning about malaria prevalence rates and the means to reduce these in the rural Ghanaian context.
The class and service focused on the economic, health, and social aspects of malaria as well as more general topics such as service learning and foreign aid and development in Africa. The fall semester seminars were taught by scholars from a variety of disciplines. For example, lectures were given on International Aid in Ghana, Modern Ghanaian Politics, No-harm Service Learning, and Economics of Developing Countries and Malaria. In addition, the class received guidance and structure in the planning of an IRB approved malaria study.
There were two two-week long volunteer sessions scheduled through the winter break, 2007-2008, each with five volunteers, a faculty member and a former Serve and Learn volunteer, Shoshana Aleinikoff, who acted as Volunteer Coordinator. Aside from the research component, volunteers were involved in education and retreatment days. They distributed more than 300 insecticide treated nets, retreated 150 nets, reached hundreds of people through education days and surveyed 350 people throughout Humjibre.
GHEI are committed to an ongoing partnership with the organization which will lead to further annual research and interventions in the village.
GHEI worked with Unite for Sight (www.uniteforsight.org), a US-based non-profit organization, on a two phase project in June 2004 and November-December, 2004. Five volunteers recruited by GHEI and Unite for Sight screened patients for operable cataracts, coordinated the logistics of bringing patients to the hospital five hours away, and distributed sunglasses.
In total, fifty-six blind patients in Humjibre received sight-restoring cataract surgery and hundreds of community members were given sunglasses.
In April 2004, Medisend International (www.medisend.org), a non-profit organization based in the US, sent a twenty foot container of medical supplies and equipment to Bibiani Government Hospital, the district where Humjibre (GHEI's base) is located. The supplies and equipment were valued at over $90,000.
