Local charity helps build African school

The secretary of a Shetland-based charity is in Africa to see what difference the group’s work is making – including a new school.

Peter Davis is involved with Project Bongo and is visiting the village of Bongo that is the focus of the charity’s work in the Upper East Region of Ghana.

The region in one of the poorest areas of this sub-Saharan country.

Mr Davis is there to meet those involved in the most recent projects the charity has undertaken – a junior high school (JHS) for Apuwongo community and the drilling of boreholes at the Bongo Senior High School.

The Apuwongo JHS was part funded by a secondary school in Middlesbrough, private donations and Project Bongo itself which facilitated the construction of the three classroom school.

It now means that the children of junior age don’t have to walk vast distances and negotiate up to three rivers simply to get to school.

These rivers become hazardous in the wet season and pupils have drowned trying to cross them.

Mr Davis met community leaders this week as well as the Ghana Education Service (GES) in Bongo and elders of Apuwongo to formally hand over the school which opened last year.

Back in Bongo village itself the charity has already financed the drilling of one borehole and electrification of the water pump on the senior high school site providing much needed water to the school kitchen and girls’ halls of residence.

A further borehole has been planned which will complete the delivery of potable water to the school.

Originally the school of almost 2,000 pupils had to rely on one old, dilapidated hand pump from one borehole nearby.

Project Bongo has forged a close relationship with the village over a number of years.

Mr Davis, with his late wife Linda, worked in Bongo on a VSO placement in 2006-08 in an educational management and teacher training role.