Project To Help Address HIV/AIDS Pandemic

A centre is to be built at Okorase near Asamankese to address the HIV/AIDS pandemic by helping to remove vulnerable children from the streets and empowering women to develop job alternatives. The goals of the initiative, dubbed Project Okorase, are to develop a family-based model for caring for children affected by HIV/AIDS and to train the youth and young adults in the arts and building industry. The project co-ordinator, Nana Ama Yeboah, told the Ghana News agency that 9.63 acres of land had been acquired at Okorase for the project that would cost over 1.5 million dollars. Nkabom Artists and Crafts People Association of Accra, Gethsemane Circle of Friends and Family Services Research Centre of the South Carolina and the Medical University of South Carolina in America fund the centre. Nana Ama Yeboah said the central focus of the project was to build a centre called Nkabom Centre for skills training and formal education that would provide education and job training for AIDS orphans. The project’s guiding principles, she said, were unity, empowerment, family and community focus, eco-friendly and sustainability. The Nkabom Centre will feature a school for street children, AIDS orphans who live at the centre and other children and those who live in the village of Okorase. In partnership with professors from the East Texas Baptist University a family and village-based school programme will be implemented with curriculum that respects and highlights the language, culture and history of the people of Ghana. On adult education, the focus of the educational component is to help adults be competitive in the global market place. A certification course in English, as a second language will be offered in addition to reading and writing. Akan and Ga languages will also be taught. Nana Yeboah said children orphaned as a result of AIDS would be offered an opportunity to grow up in a family with parents instead of being raised on the streets. They would live in homes on the grounds of the centre to be raised by mothers and grandmothers from the village of Okorase who would be given the opportunity to live in a house with water, electricity and daily food in exchange for AIDS orphans in their families.