By: Stephanie Shea
My path to Ghana was a kind of indirect one. In 2016, I had an MA in criminology, a BA in women’s studies, two years as a research assistant, and three years of volunteer work with a local non-profit. I had an increasingly unsettling student loan balance. I had 32 polite rejection letters and one overarching theme in my life: not enough work experience.
I was paying my bills by working as a diner cook while I waited for something to break open. That’s when I came across a job posting online for a volunteer program abroad. EQWIP advertised 3- or 12-month contracts, in a variety of international offices. It was a project aimed at helping young un- and under-employed Canadians develop themselves professionally while contributing to international development (ID).
They were recruiting everyone: ecological impact researchers, business advisors, communications specialists, digital engagement workers. Fundraise a contribution to their innovation fund, and off you go. Hashtag propelling youth forward.
Hashtags are something I could generally do without, and I’m perfectly aware that anyone who wants money from you on the Internet is always a catfish, no matter what. But when I went to Global Affairs Canada registry, EQWIP was indeed listed as a recipient of their funding. They were serious. I banged out an application to be a gender equality advisor, and the process began.
They did all the responsible things one would hope for from a youth-focused organization; they asked for a criminal record check, interviewed my references, followed up about yellow fever vaccinations, took my banking information for payroll (a modest monthly stipend, enough to live on while you’re abroad), and eventually sent me my ticket to Tamale, Ghana. I got off the plane with my head still spinning, and thus began my first job in international development. It would incidentally be the most educational year of my life.
International development is a wild ride. As someone who never studied it or planned to go into it, it helps me to think of it as the more proactive, less reactionary older brother of emergency relief work. Instead of disaster management, ID involves building infrastructure and other sorts of long-term intervention.
Done unethically (see Confessions of an Economic Hitman), ID can be a horrifying practice. In the middle of the spectrum, you see a lot of voluntourism and culture-blind useless efforts. Handled well, though, even my cynical heart somewhat believes that these projects can move mountains.
Take Saha Global. This American non-governmental organization works in Ghana, taking elderly women from rural communities with limited social support and no livelihoods. Saha sets these women up with water purification materials. The women sell the water back to their communities for pennies. Women’s livelihoods are improved, and illnesses and deaths due to water contamination decrease.
My project took us underemployed Canadians and brought us to staff a small office that provided job training for underemployed Ghanaians. We offered employment readiness classes and entrepreneurship training to people our own age. The training ran the gamut from ‘stop putting smileys in your work emails’ to ‘here’s how to calculate your operating budget.’
EQWIP has five years of funding from the Canadian Government, so the aim wasn’t just to train youth during that time, but to set up a sustainable system for lasting change. We developed partnerships in each city, and worked with staff at those organizations so that they’d be ready to take over and deliver our training programs as an addition to their core services.
In Tamale, we worked with the local branch of the Ghanaian National Service Scheme (NSS). In Ghana, if you complete any kind of university, you owe one year of your life to a government labour pool, and will be posted to various offices around the country. The aim is to repay society for their part in subsidizing your education, and to give recent grads some meaningful work experience.
EQWIP has been folding in work conduct and readiness training to be delivered to NSS personnel before starting those placements, and then offering more intensive trainings to those who completed their placements and still couldn’t find jobs. The program is concise, the advice it offers is good, and twinning just a little more professional development to the already existing placement system will hopefully be worthwhile and useful for everyone.
Work stuff aside, it was a year just as full of ridiculous stories as you could hope for. I got woken up at 3 a.m. one morning to discover the cell network and Internet were down and my roommate had been stung by a scorpion. I fought a goat and accidentally bit into a cockroach that got into the hot chocolate powder. I once thought someone was trying to break into my room, but it turned out to be a baboon. I went a full year without a good cup of coffee, but I ate passionfruit off the vine and mango off the tree. I learned the value of a good pocket knife. I survived malaria.
What I thought was going to be a stepping stone is turning into a vocation. Yes, plenty of my co-volunteers in the same boat have come back and found work, and I know that’s an option for me down the line. Right now, I’m applying for a gig to head to Sri Lanka in January to do it all over again.
