Mbowura

My short visit to Mbowura started with a two hour ride in the back of a motorbike. The road was red, the sky blue and the trees green – I couldn’t see a lot of details because I had to choose between a helmet and my glasses but the landscape yelled rural Ghana. Almost every EWB JF does what is called a “village stay” in an attempt to learn more about the people we are hoping to help. My purpose in visiting Mbowura was to learn about what it is like to live in rural Northern Ghana and about one of KITE’s projects, the Multifunctional Platform.

the road

My hosts were the chief of the village, Anthony, and his family. This was great because I learned a lot from spending time with one of the most educated members of the community and it was easy to ask questions because he speaks English and most of the people don’t. Every morning, at least three people came by to say hello and greet us before they headed to their farms. People in the village are from at least two different tribes so when the Chief goes around greeting “his people” in the morning, he does the greetings in two languages.

Some buildings in the village

According to the Chief, I brought rain with me to Mbowura. Most people in Mbowura farm cassava, yams, and groundnuts for subsistence so they were beginning to worry because the rains hadn’t come yet. When it rained all morning on my first day, we all waited patiently and enjoyed the smell of wet soil. Everything stops with the rain: farmers don’t go to farm, teachers don’t come to the school (although the children do), and the women watch their metal containers fill up with the rainwater. In some says, everything seems to follow the natural flow of things in Mbowura: wake up at 5 with the sun, farm the food that you will eat, rest after a day of farming and go to bed when the sky is dark.

Chief Anthony planting tomatoes on the side of a yam mount

After the rain had gone, we walked to see the Chief’s farms. He had finished planting his yams so the field was all covered in yam mounts surrounded by cassava plants. Once the yams are harvested, he will move the yams to a new farm and plant groundnut in the old one. Then, he will harvest the groundnuts and eventually the cassava. Of course, all of this means countless hours of backbreaking work under the sun.

Kwame bikes from his house every day to farm cassava. He prefers living far from his field because there is electricity there and not in Mbowura.


Apart from cassava, farmers in Mbowura have recently started farming soya beans. SEND, the local NGO through which KITE implemented the MFP, introduced the crop as a way of increasing the food security in the area. Soya beans cannot only be sold as cash crops but they are also very nutritious and they have become part of the diet of some of the families in Mbowura. The group of farmers that SEND has worked with for the past three years has 27 members and is made up of farm families (husband and wife). This is because women also farm “women crops” such as pepe, okro, tomatoes and other vegetables for cooking.

This lady didn’t seem to want to stop farming anytime soon

Back at the house, Madame Cynthia was always busy making food: boiled yams with soya bean stew on one day; t.z. with palmnut soup and bush fowl the next one. The rest of the time she was either at her farm, cleaning or looking after her three daughters. I tried helping but doing the dishes was the only thing I convinced her I could do.

Madame Cynthia preparing a meal

When I told the Chief that I wanted to learn more about what women do he decided to take me around the village. In one of the houses, a lady was spreading shea nuts on the ground. She explained that the process of making shea butter is very long and requires a lot of work: collecting the nuts and carrying them from the field, removing the pulp, drying the nuts, extracting the oil, cooking it into a paste and so many other steps that I couldn’t keep track of all of them. At the end, this woman sells each small ball of shea butter for only 5 pesewas (5 cents) at the market.

This lady is one of the only people in the village who still know how to make thread


Close to the evening and once the women have collected the cassava from the field, it was time for the platform to start operations. The MFP is a small diesel engine that can power different machines and the farmer group in Mbowura uses it to process cassava into gari and grind maize, cassava and guinea corn to make flour to make t.z. The group charges a small fee to everyone that needs to use it and then pays an operator. Selassi from SEND comes by frequently to check on the platform and help the group with any maintenance or getting parts for the platform.

Making flour

The Chief introduced me to some of the members of the cooperative, including the lady who is the treasurer. From what he told me, having the MFP has allowed the women of Mbowura to process cassava into gari closer to their fields. Now they do not have to walk all the way to Kpandai (about 15 minutes away on a motorbike) to get it processed and make more money by selling it at the market once it’s processed.


The last step in the gari processing is frying dry grinded cassava in these big pans

In one of our many conversations I asked the Chief what he thought about NGOs. He had many stories to reply with. He told me that less than ten years ago the community was suffering from guinea worm, a worm that can grow up to 1 m long inside of you and burst your skin open as it tries to get out. He and other members of the community had learned that how to prevent it by avoiding the water from the stream and using a borehole that an NGO installed. His son and daughters were born in an Mbowura that was free of guinea worm. There was also a not feeling so good story of a group of white people who had once visited Mbowura briefly and asked the community what they wanted. Then they sent a totally useless machine that was far from being the grinding mill that they needed.

Girls stand under the pipe in this borehole as the water pours down on big buckets of water on their heads.

Even though we were up early, the days went quickly as the Chief kept me busy meeting people and I kept him busy with many questions. He loved talking about farming and how people in the community perform funerals- with a lot of music, I was told. On my second day, I was sitting just outside the room where I was staying – his room – and I noticed that there was something written in the concrete slab. To my surprise, the Chief told me that it was his father’s grave and that his mother’s was just on the other side of the house. I tried not to think about this when I went to bed that night and focused on the goats who were finding a comfortable place to sleep just outside my door instead.
Playing a game. Can you find any girls in this picture? Right, they are all doing chores.


On my last night in Mbowura, the Chief and I had both ran out of questions so we sat quietly in the cool night looking at the clear sky. I hadn’t done any physical work like everyone else around me, yet, absorbing the reality of life in Mbowura was somehow exhausting. One of the wise sayings from the people from Mbowura is that "As much as the stranger widens his eyes, he does not see the town’s secrets". My conversations with the Chief had been so insightful, but had I learned as much as possible? Did I understand what it is to live in a small village and worry about what I will eat if the rains dont come in time? I wasn't sure. As I said goodbye to the peace and simplicity of Mbowura, I decided to put that thought aside for a while and just enjoy the fact of being there.