Community Organizing Can End Child Marriages In Ghana

Despite a very novel article I got published on Modern Ghana Web relating to the efficacy of Community Organizing and the viability and capacity of a Community Government Project, a lack of cognizance by policy makers and development agents, reminds me to reintroduce the subject. This week, the sad story of child marriage originating from the Upper East Region and headlining in the Northern Region was aired by Joy News. Dissecting the various angles of the issue by stakeholders including Children, Gender and Social Protection Minister, Madam Otiko Djaba Afisa in an interview, the stack problem of poverty came to the fore.

Indeeed, the girl child in question originated from a rural community of Naaga in the Upper East Region which is primarily an agrarian community deprived in so many ways including education, healthcare, sufficient recreation, adequate basic social services among others. Interestingly, just like many rural communities in many areas especially in the Northern part of Ghana, very minor challenges like child marriage have often teamed up to shape and condemn the destinies of millions of people into very unpleasant nightmare scenarios. But Community organizing in its various forms has the track record of achieving tremendous ends and must be the option to pursue.

This is because community organizing can unleash a new wave of energy from within the community and provide the power to drive home the agenda of development. It can build influence, provide representation and participation, build commitment, bring social change and reforms and establish a winning reputation. It can provide targeted development because these local communities know better, their most pressing needs and the conditions that shape them.

In Africa, and most parts of the developing world, the state has often failed to roll out and sustain policy programs that will directly tackle the challenges confronting citizens living in the most deprived and remote parts of the country. In other cases, these states, led by their governments have rather misapplied and mismanaged funding secured or granted for anti-poverty programs.

Alongside state failure, the works of Non-Government Organizations in this same regard are more than less uncoordinated resulting in insignificant impact on very isolated populations. It is also the case that some of these Non-Government Organizations misuse and misappropriate funds in the same way and manner like that of government officials.

The result of this state of affairs is a deepening of the poverty situation in already less deprived communities in which human capacities are already low, access to basic necessities is low and the prevalence of disease remain high, keeping the gulf between them and the few endowed in the country more deep and wide.

Not surprisingly, the majority of citizens in these parts of the world still resort to very crude ways of living by: sharing drinking water with frogs and toads in surface dug-out wells rather than walking tens of miles to access boreholes; exploiting their local vegetation for use as fuel for cooking and lighting if they do not wish to spend their entire incomes on proper energy sources; using local herbs from trees and performing cruel practices like body markings to cure diseases if they wish not to cross streams and rivers on boats to clinics tens of miles away; and marrying early and many to raise families to provide agricultural labor if they choose not to endure the cost of education which outstrips their lifetime earnings entirely.

However, these are mostly communities endowed massively with natural resources that can be tapped to make life a booming and exciting episode such as large populations with impressive talents, vast and fertile flat lands that include large portions of river valleys, and numerous water resources that can provide great potential for irrigation farming.

To allow these to go to waste is to not appreciate nature’s gift of an exciting life; and to fail to affect the lives of the inhabitants of these communities with sound resource mobilization and exploitation, is sheer cruelty of mankind to his fellows.

Herein lies the challenge of organizing these poor but deprived rural communities which are naturally endowed to provide meaningful development to reduce joblessness, inequality and disease. It is a challenge that governments of the developing world have the muscles to meet but have not shown the commitment of doing; a challenge Non-Government Organizations are more primed to do but are ineffectively delivering; and a challenge that poor rural communities must meet by themselves but have long failed to recognize the immense power they have to make it happen.

This challenge brings to the fore the imminent need for community organizing: a process that galvanizes together local community residents with common conditions and situations to provide durable power that can be channeled towards providing community development and solving local problems. The reason for community organizing is that poor rural communities are so uniquely deprived and impoverished in such a manner that they require good leadership and direction to be able to set their eyes on the horizon of determination and the hope of achievement.

In most cases, they lack a central point of authority that can regulate and provide coordination and direction; they lack representation that can ensure participation and commitment; they lack the belief in communalism, hence making it difficult to self-organize; and they lack basic public development which dissipates confidence in the state and politics.

In this regard, before any meaningful development can be taken or initiated from within these communities, there ought to be a committed program to organize these communities and channel that organization towards the basic needs, goals and aspirations of the people.

Community organizing in its various forms has the track record of achieving tremendous ends and must be the option to pursue. This is because community organizing can unleash a new wave of energy from within the community and provide the power to drive home the agenda of development. It can build influence, provide representation and participation, build commitment, bring social change and reforms and establish a winning reputation. It can provide targeted development because these local communities know better, their most pressing needs and the conditions that shape them.

The secret of providing success through community organizing lies in the belief that change can only come if we come together to compel state authorities and corporations to respond to the needs of local communities. When local community members come together, they are capable of waging a fierce and relentless war against the social ills of unemployment, inequality and disease that ravages the hopes of generation upon generation.

According to Alinsky Saul, “a people’s organization is dedicated to an eternal war against poverty, misery, delinquency, disease, injustice, hopelessness, despair and unhappiness. They are basically the same issues which nations have gone to war in almost every generation…..war is not an intellectual debate, and in the war against social evils there are no rules of fair play”.

Understanding the need for a project of community organizing leads to the question of who to lead the process and what shape the organization should take. This is in view of the fact that local communities themselves have not the leadership initiative to provide direction and the financial wherewithal to provide funding; and the state is ill-prepared to lead such a process.

Be as it may, key individuals within the community can liaise with the power players of the state and NGOs to undertake the process. It may be frustrating at first, but the benefits of being directly involved in bringing progressive change to the life of one’s community are everlasting. Throughout history, people who achieved world acclaim have often been leaders of change in their communities. The likes of Mark Anderson, Cesar Charez, Mary Harris Jones, Martin Luther King Junior and more recently, Barack Hussein Obama, are all renowned community organizers worthy of emulation. These are people who held on to the arc of history and bent it a little more towards change that shaped generations of America.

In our local communities, we can build ourselves by organizing our communities to demand more from government and civil society when we establish a fierce reputation of unity and strength. The power of a united community that seeks consistently a better living from its government lies not in the real power it has, but the power the government thinks it has. As stated explicitly by Alinsky Saul, “the first rule of power tactics is that power is not what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have”.

Even if one cannot be the same as the likes of Barack Obama, one can provide the initiative for people to pounce on and deliver this change that generations will one day remember with the fondest of memories and the greatest of appreciation.

Concerning the shape of the initiative, community organizing may be faith based or others; but with challenges confronting whole communities with different categories of people and groups, the type of organizing that involves the entirety of the community will deliver the goods.

The modest of all can be a project that seeks first to provide public consultation and awareness creation among the populations of these communities. This follows with a structure that starts with an Assembly that seeks representation from all groups of people within the community such as gender specific groups, traditional groups and leaders, political leaders, occupational groups and recreational or social groups which will serve as a forum for discussing local community issues. From this mass of people, a Council can emerge of key individuals with the special task of formulating programs and policies emerging from discussions of the Assembly. A third structure may involve setting up Ad-hoc Committees comprising people with unique specialties selected from within the community and tasked with the duty of executing specific programs formulated by the council.

However, different communities may roll out structures that best suit their own special conditions and the socio-cultural configuration. The assurance nonetheless is that, these structures will bring a coordinated system of power structure and authority which will control community affairs and promote social order in the conduct of people in the community. It will also serve as a check-point from which local community problems can be discussed and solved. The simplest scenario is that, it will provide the authority needed in the community to stop noise making and deforestation for instance; and also be the driving force to organize influence and resources for the provision of boreholes and public toilets if these be the needs of the community.

In 2001, the U.S government under the Bush administration, launched a department in the White House tasked with the specific responsibility of promoting community organizing. In all justifications, this remains the single biggest attempt at the global level to explain the emerging necessity of community organizing.

In Africa, and across the developing world, lack of commitment as well as incessant corruption and exploitation of the citizenry by successive governments of the state have led to failure of the state to develop poor rural communities. Also, the lack of coordination and instances of misapplication of funds by NGOs has resulted in their ineffectiveness at taking over the role of the state in providing development to poor rural communities by eliminating poverty.

These serve as a clear premise on which to call upon citizens in poor rural communities to pick themselves up, dust themselves up, roll their sleeves and begin the work to providing their own development. At least, the state may provide the assistance, but the destiny of a poor rural community wherever in the world lies in the hands of its people.

By David Azuliya

Mobile: 0505005012

Email: [email protected]