The Gambigo Ghana Project – an Upper East Region based Non-Governmental Organization which was formed in 2004 with funding support from the West Africa Civil Society Initiative (WACSI) is said to be soaring. Started by the chief of Gambigo as a hobby, the prince started planting trees in his area and later got into transformed his hobby into an NGO to support communities in tree planting, craft-making and basket weaving through livelihoods empowerment.
Naba Sadik Inusah told Word News that “the ‘Gambigo Ghana Project’ started like a hobby and later became an NGO because a hobby with individual was not possible, so his friends from the Netherlands encourage me”.
According to Naba Sadik, the first achievement of the NGO was the rehabilitation of the Gambigo dam that supported farmers and domestic animals in the area. It also supported farmers and planting of trees and currently, the Gambigo Ghana Project is operating in about eleven centres across the region. Areas that are benefiting from the project include; Kandiaga, Atiyoorum Kurugo, Nabago, Yoongo.
The NGO is also supporting women groups in Sirigu, who are engaged in basket weaving, pottery and art work.
He indicated that the 25 youth who were trained were selected across the entire region and trained on solar electric fencing to help prevent animals from destroying the trees during dry seasons.
Speaking exclusively to Word News after the team of officials fom West Africa Civil Society Initiative visited the region to ascertain the progress of the Gambigo Ghana Project, Mr. Charles Kojo Vandyck, head of capacity development of West Africa Civil society expressed satisfaction after touring parts of the region where some of the ‘Gambigo Ghana Project’ exist.
According to Mr. Charles Kojo, West Africa Civil Society Initiative (WACSI) works with rural communities, community groups like the Gambigo Ghana Project who are into livelihood projects like irrigation, tree planting and supporting women to have a livelihood.
“The program is called the local fund raising, local resource mobilization. what we do is, we work with community groups like Gambigo and others who are doing livelihood projects like for example the projects they are going with irrigation, planting trees , trying to give opportunities to women and men to be able to have a livelihood, we help them to mobilize money or to be able to mobilized other types of support.
One of the other services we do now is to do what we called match funding. Apart from the training, we don’t stop there because training is not enough. we can train people but it doesn’t mean that they will succeed, so we saw that training is not adequate, so we are doing what we called matching funding, so what we do is that we challenged you to mobilized some money so lets say you mobilize 30,000 and we match it with another 30,000 to support your efforts, it’s a way of encouraging people to be able to look within their own community for resources to find solutions to their own problems” he noted.
Source: mywordfmonline.com/Gaspard Ayuureneeya