My subteam is working with the Accra Metropolitan Authority, basically the City Hall organization, who have responsibility for the capital city Accra, with 4.3M inhabitants, and an additional 1M who commute in every day. It's a bustling booming metropolis that has outgrown it's infrastructure. Traffic is crazy, schools are full, and services are strained.
Our main executive contract is Lydia Sackey, who is the Budget Director, a lovely warm lady who has made us most welcome. We are working on two projects for her. One, to address the Building Permit process to achieve their goal of delivering a permit in 90 days and two, to provide tools to help teachers elevate their capabilities especially in the teaching and use of computers in the school. All in 4 weeks!
 |
| Mrs Sackey at right front, Vivian and Samuel middle back, while visiting a school. |
 | ||||||||
| Front - Emily, Samuel, Vivian, Mrs Sackey. Back - Tony, Ken, Greg, Mr. Akoto |
To say we've been busy is an understatement. We leave before 7am, often with no breakfast, we get to the office by 8:15 or so, and immediately people are arriving at our office to great us and plan the day. Meetings, meetings, meetings, all day long. We had lunch once all week and capped off Friday with a 3 hour status meeting to align on what we had learned so far and what we would do going forward. There is so much that can be done!!
We have been impressed with the amount of work that is already underway in these projects but the challenges have been mostly around pulling together many disparate projects that support our objectives. A world that operates without email makes for significant gaps in information flows to those who would greatly benefit from it. We are optimistic that we can pull many of them together into a cohesive strategy as well as produce some very practical deliverables. But today was a good day; many times our optimism has plummeted only to be skyrocketed back up again as a result of another positive discussion that points us to a way to solve our problems.
We were invited to meet the Mayor, Mr Vanderpooy on Wednesday morning. He is an inspiring leader who is passionate about education, and spent much time telling us to make a difference, take that first step and that the children were his most important focus. We were proud to have the opportunity to talk to him. Yesterday, his assistant came to get us, saying the Mayor wished to speak to us again. Wow, we thought - this is fabulous. We went to his office, and he sat down and asked us how we were doing. Then he told us that he thought he could get the roof on the school in time, and could we install the equipment next week? We were quite confused. He said he thought we were leaving soon and was accelerating the roofing - could we work with his new schedule? We were still confused. Turns out his assistant had found the wrong group to come and talk to him... oh well. We did say we'd be happy to help if we could, the door to his office was unlocked and out we went!
We are exhausted but will get no rest this weekend! We are departing at 6am for a weekend trip to the Volta region, an area of untouched natural beauty to the east of us. I am very much looking forward to it and will send you news on Sunday!
Volta Region of Ghana
No comments:
Post a Comment