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About the foundation
WEGLOF was founded in 2009 after watching what widows, orphans and twins from deprived communities in northern Ghana carry. It began with five households in Korania, in the Kasena Nankana Municipal area.
Why the foundation exists
Despite national effort to give households, schools and health facilities across Ghana access to food, nutrition, safe drinking water and sanitation, women and children in rural northern Ghana still face barriers that are an affront to their health and wellbeing.
Access to basic sanitation stood at an estimated 21% in 2019 — 17% in rural areas, 25% in urban. The Ghana Statistical Service recorded in 2018 that only one household in five has an improved toilet, while about 22% of the population still practise open defecation, with the health, economic and social costs that follow.
Those costs are counted in infant illness and death — roughly nine million reported cases and ten thousand deaths a year from water, sanitation and hygiene related disease such as diarrhoea. Adult outpatient attendance for the same causes puts further pressure on thin household incomes and takes away productive hours.
Women in northern Ghana have less access to and control over productive resources, and little or no say in decisions taken at community and household level. That compounds everything else, and it is the reason the foundation's work is directed at women first.
What the foundation is for
To address seasonal food insecurity among deprived households — widows, female farmers and needy children — through social and economic empowerment, so that they can meet their basic needs and, in time, the multi-dimensional poverty around them can be addressed sustainably.
The legacy WEGLOF and its partners hope to leave is the sustainability of a proven model: a shift from subsistence farming to a social, economic and educational footing that holds on its own.
What we do
Building and strengthening female community-based organisations so that a group can act, hold funds and negotiate as one.
The patient part: keeping a group together between seasons, and keeping the work going when the first enthusiasm has passed.
Supporting access to primary care for households that would otherwise weigh the cost of a clinic visit against a meal.
Promotion of safe hygiene behaviour in households and schools, in a region where open defecation is still common and the disease burden follows from it.
Raising awareness of the issues that keep women out of decisions, and running the financial literacy that has to come before a loan does.
Training in organic soap making and in extracting and processing plant oils — baobab, moringa, neem and carrot — alongside micro loans and direct supply of food, school lunches, uniforms and educational materials.
Where we work
The foundation began in the Kasena Nankana Municipal area and works outward from there, in the same communities year after year.
