Establishing the Wa Polytechnic

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Country: Ghana
Project location within country: Upper West Region
Duration: Five years
Budget: Approximate value of services: $1.2 million
Project status: Complete

Project description

The Establishing the Wa Polytechnic (EWP) sought to assist the Wa Polytechnic (WP) in developing programming that reflected the unique dimensions of the local communities it had a mandate to serve. The Wa Polytechnic was established by legislation in 1999, fulfilling a government policy to establish a polytechnic in each region in Ghana. The Upper West Region is one of the poorest regions in the country, where over 75% of the inhabitants are engaged in small scale agriculture characterized by environmental degradation, diminishing yields and growing food insecurity. As a result, over 70% of the population lives in poverty, close to double the national average.

Goal

To reduce poverty among rural people in Ghana’s Upper West Region by supporting the Ghana Poverty Reduction Strategy with the sustainable delivery of formal and non-formal skills training and technology transfer programs relevant to the demonstrated needs of local communities.

To assist the WP to improve training accessibility and relevance to the income-generating needs of the rural poor in the Upper West Region (UWR) through:

• sustained management cooperation with related institutions and stakeholders
• increased program relevance to community needs
• improved teaching/learning resources
• increased capacity to deliver and monitor the results of non-formal community-driven training

Partners

Wa Polytechnic

Results

The project allowed the WP to respond to the Ghana Poverty Reduction Strategy by assisting in the development of non-formal training that was essential in addressing the learning needs of the vast majority of the people in the UWR that lacked the academic pre-requisites for entry to post-secondary diploma programs. The project assisted in the development of numerous non-formal programs that reached this targeted group of people. The development and launch of the Strategic Plan for the WP was the first step in mobilizing key stakeholders in the region, such as NGO’s, local government authorities, the private sector, micro-credit facilities and social stakeholders.

The project not only assisted in the improvement in the capacity of the WP to deliver market-driven programming to the community, but assisted in the facilitation of local partnerships to ensure that trainees were able to improve their ability to find employment and self-employment and enhance the capacity of the instructors to deliver appropriate training that met the unique needs of the community.

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