Up in the North

The Internet at JOY is allowing me to post some photos today, so I thought I might take the opportunity to post some pictures from last week, when I travelled up to Tamale, the capital of Ghana's Northern Region.

I visited one school in the Nanjbagu-Yapala area to discuss a few issues with the head teacher. JOY FM has been following the government's school feeding programme. The idea is that children are given one meal a day (using food produced by local farmers) as an incentive to keep them coming back to school. The programme sounds ideal on paper but has a few problems. One is that it's led to extreme overcrowding in some classrooms and putting more stress on teachers who are already dealing with low wages and a lack of resources.
At the school I visited overcrowding wasn't exactly a problem - there were only 50 students! (The head teacher assured me that they are growing and hope to enroll 80 by the end of the year.) There were five classes. The youngest class had children ranging in age from 7 years to toddlers fast asleep on the floor. Many of these kids' parents travel long ways to farm as the land in the village is no longer fruitful. So they leave all their kids to the school, knowing that they will get a square meal and a virtual babysitter for the day. I snapped some pictures of the kids and the school as a reporter and I drove away in a pick up truck belonging to a local Tamale radio station.