* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
This week, Ann Cotton, Camfed International’s Executive Director, will be blogging from Ghana as she travels with Dolores Dickson, Camfed Ghana’s Executive Director, Reeta Roy, President and CEO of The MasterCard Foundation and Deepali Khanna, Director of Youth Learning at The MasterCard Foundation. They are in Ghana to launch a partnership between Camfed and The MasterCard Foundation that will benefit more than 1 million people.
Let me introduce Saudatu Mohammed (pictured above). We meet her during the hungry season, those months before the rains and harvest when stored food is being eked out and bought food is becoming more and more expensive.
Saudatu is president of a 20-strong Mother Support Group, a Camfed volunteer program, in the Tolon district of northern Ghana. With her group, she makes soap balls out of soda and oil, selling them in the community for a profit that is very small.
Saudatu is the kind of person for whom Thomas Gray might have written his ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.’ She is a powerhouse, a woman of charisma and vitality—a grandmother whose spirit endures in the face of the acute hardships of her life.
She is the caregiver of her grandchildren, including a girl who has run away to become “kayaye,” a street porter, in Accra. Across the marketplaces of Accra, you can see young girls and boys who have left their villages to travel hundreds of miles in search of a little income, carrying heavy goods on their heads across the city for a few cedis.
“One day, she said she was going to get a bowl from a neighbor, but she did not come back,” Saudatu told me.
“She had a little money and she took the bus.”
Her granddaughter went because she had no opportunities that would give her a better life. This was the second occasion that she had left. In the first, Saudatu saved money for the bus fare and persuaded her granddaughter to come home. But little changed, and she had taken her chance once again.
Saudatu worries a great deal about her granddaughter’s safety. She wants her to come back. She wants her to go to school. So does her granddaughter
