AFRICAN CALABASH VOLUNTEER - Ejura, Ghana

African Calabash Volunteer is a charity organization in Ghana that seeks to promote the Millenium Development Goals through volunteering, Advocacy and Capacity Building. The charity is registered with the Department of Social Welfare in Ghana. The organization is based in Ejura in the Ashanti Region of Ghana.
The African Calabash Volunteer was started by a group of teachers in the Ejura Sekyedumasi District in the Ashanti region of Ghana. The group was mobilized to start the membership base of the organization by the founder, Richard Kofi Armah in the year 2009..
We are collaborating with World Vision and other developmental partners to sponsor seventy- five (75) orphans and vulnerable children in Ghana.
The education of the girl child is our utmost priority. We want to empower girls,  

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especially the teenagers in the rural areas in Ghana.
We believe love is a gift of God and as such needs to be shared with every one in the world.
OUR PROJECT
African calabash volunteer is dedicated to offering volunteering opportunities for people who want to volunteer or take part in the following programme:

MICROFINANCE
EDUCATION
DEVELOPMENTAL DISABILITIES
ALBINISM AWARENESS PROGRAMME
CONSERVATION AND ENVIRONMENT
DEVELOPMENTAL DISABILITIES
This programme is open to volunteers who want to teach children with developmental disabilities. The new skill may be a hobby or an income generating activity. Many children with developmental disabilities are out of school because there is no special school in our district to train them. Parents of such children fail to enroll their wards in special schools in other parts of Ghana because they don’t value the education of children or people with developmental disabilities. Some parents cite financial challenges as their reason for not enrolling the special children in schools. African Calabash Volunteer is working to train such children by recruiting volunteers willing to share their creative skills with those children.
MICROFINANCE
We have been able to create several income generation activities through our Microfinance project. Many people, mostly women have escaped from the poverty trap courtesy of our microfinance programme. The microfinance programme was adopted to help poor families in rural Ghana break the cycle of poverty. A total number of forty (40) women have benefitted from our microfinance programme so far. African Calabash Volunteer is currently working on implementing the Village Savings and Loans Association (VSLA) in poor communities. You can help promote our microfinance by donating financial resources to beef-up our current efforts. Volunteers can also help by sharing their technical knowledge on microfinance with our field officers and office staff. Volunteer to use your skills to create innovative solutions for the poor in our communities.

EDUCATION
African Calabash Volunteer is affiliated with many schools in Ghana to enable our volunteers to help raise the reading, writing and speaking abilities of children in our communities. Volunteers are placed in schools to assist local teachers in teaching English language to pupils. You can volunteer as an English teacher in Ghana during your gap year, career break or during an extended vacation. You can gain this work experience without any previous teaching experience, and we do not require you to have a TEFL qualification. Our volunteer English teaching projects in Ghana not only benefit the people in the schools where we work but also the wider communities. You can work with primary or secondary school children so let us know your preference. You can teach English to children of any age, and are also likely to be asked to help local teachers brush up on their own language skills. Our volunteers teach conversational English in schools to a range of ages and abilities. While you'll have the basics of a blackboard and chalk, classrooms often lack other resources. Your most important resource is yourself, so try to draw on all your experiences and interests to really bring the lessons alive. Bringing items from home such as photos, stamps and magazines can be great for building lessons around, and our Teaching booklet will also give you plenty of ideas. This volunteer project involves teaching primary school children using dedicated one-on-one sessions to help bring them up to required standards. The aim is to give certain students extra attention as they have fallen behind the rest of their peers. Some of the children struggle to understand their teachers because their home language is not English.
After working with each child, not only may you see a measurable improvement in their abilities, the children should also be more confident and comfortable once they return to their classrooms.
Our education volunteer project is based in Accra and Ejura in the Ashanti Region of Ghana.

ALBINISM AWARENESS PROGRAMME
African Calabash Volunteer is an organization that also aims to provide information, advice and support for people with albinism and their families. We also provide information about the condition to professionals working with people with albinism, and other appropriate interested parties.We need volunteers who will volunteer to provide information on albinism to make people more aware of what this condition is about. African Calabash Volunteer is a member of WORLD ALBINISM ALLIANCE. We need in-kind donations of new and gently used low vision equipment such as hand held magnifiers, binoculars, monocular and low vision closed circuit television (CCTV’s).
CONSERVATION AND ENVIRONMENT
In spite of the numerous benefits we derive from the forest (ie foreign exchange earnings from timber exports, woodfuel, bushmeat, direct and indirect employment, habitat for wildlife and other valuable genetic resources, storing and recycling carbon), the forest continues to be under serious threat of degradation.
The major drivers of deforestation as most of you know include; over exploitation of timber, especially by illegal chainsaw operators; rampant annual fires; increasing conversion of forest lands (especially off-reserve areas) to agricultural land due to population pressure; excessive surface mining; inadequate enforcement of policies and regulations.
The devastating effects of forest degradation in Ghana, especially during the past two decades are beginning to manifest themselves in the extinction of premium timber species (odum, mahogany, sapele) and drastic reduction in the raw material base of the timber industry, loss of biodiversity, drying up of water bodies and loss of tourist sites and other natural resources that are important sources of revenue and livelihood support for the rural people.
This has also contributed significantly to climate change and global warming. These issues are not only of national concern but also have international implications.
African Calabash Volunteer Conservation and Environment Programme aims at planting more trees and educating people about the harmful effect of depleting the environment of its natural resources.

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African Calabash Volunteer is not affiliated with any government or religious organization. We receive our funding from program fees, developmental partners such as World Vision, membership contributions and farming activities.