Reflections on Entrepreneurial Volunteering in West African Villages
By Celia Gellman,
Reed University '09,
Unite For Sight 2009 Global Impact Fellow in Tamale, Ghana
In Summer 2009, I traveled to northern Ghana under the auspices of Unite For Sight, a phenomenal organization that seeks to eliminate preventable blindness and that has, since its inception in 2000, trained over 6500 volunteers and provided eye care to 900,000 patients living in extreme poverty. To help Dr. Seth Wanye—the only ophthalmologist in a region of over 2 million people—I conducted visual acuity screenings in Dagbani (the regional language), assisted in the operating room, collected and helped distribute 500 pairs of eyeglasses prescribed by the local eye doctors, and fundraised $1695 to cover the cost of 34 cataract surgeries.
Restoring vision to hundreds of thousands of people as Unite For Sight (UFS) has done is hugely significant, but I couldn’t help but lament the work we still have left to do to effect large-scale systemic change in the developing world. The poverty I saw seemed a catch-22 swirling around how the lack of jobs, lack of money, and lack of quality education and health services iteratively feed into one another in a seemingly never-ending cycle. Stopping this cycle, most can agree, is not a matter of resources but of their effective mobilization: ensuring worldwide access to basic healthcare, for example, would cost only 0.1% of the rich world’s income, according to the world’s leading poverty expert Jeffrey Sachs.[1] But how? Government-to-government donations have been shown to be the least effective form of aid distribution [2,3], but I also saw numerous ineffective non-profit band-aid causes (see Unite For Sight's Global Health Course: The Significant Harm of Worst Practices), aid organizations and microfinance agencies dispersed around the region that are not producing an effective, wide-ranging and sustainable impact. [3]
Thinking critically about sustainable, accountable, effective aid intervention and development strategies was part of my the intensive pre-departure preparation that UFS requires of all its volunteers. It was essentially a crash-course in global health, social entrepreneurship, and ethical, impactful health-related aid work. I feel that it was being armed with this background, along with my experience abroad, that enabled me to embark on my own social entrepreneurship ventures while in Ghana. In one project I became involved with, I’m collaborating with the Ghanaian Ministry of Health and former UFS volunteers from Britain to build and staff a hospital, which we envision (eventually) to be a conceptual fusion of Medecins Sans Frontières and UFS in accommodating Western volunteers; in the other project, I am working with the Ghanaian UFS volunteer coordinator toward two goals: increasing a group of poor rural women’s business profits by expanding to Western markets (“conscious capitalism” [4]), and bringing down their fertility rates via sex-education, family planning, and distribution of contraceptives. These are both exceedingly ambitious projects, and I will not laud their success until we measure and demonstrate sustainable positive results, but they typify what can happen when you round up a batch of smart young people whose idealism is informed by practicality, best-practices development training by Unite For Sight, and experience. I could not have begun trying to construct social entrepreneurial ventures without the foundation provided by UFS’s global health conference, the extensive pre-departure volunteer training and the actual on-the-ground experience I gained while abroad on the UFS program.
This is why I whole-heartedly recommend the UFS volunteer-abroad program to anyone interested in global health and international development, public health policy, medicine, social entrepreneurship, nonprofits, human rights, development economics, anthropology, advocacy, or public service. By the same token, I strongly recommend to anyone interested in the above domains to attend the annual Unite For Sight Global Health Conference at Yale, where I presented research last April.
Footnotes
[1] Interview with Jeffrey Sachs. (2007.) Unite For Sight Conference, Yale University. Available at http://www.uniteforsight.org/videos/jeffreysachs2007
[2] Banerjee, Abhijit Vinayak. Making Aid Work. Boston: MIT Press, 2007.
[3] Corwall, A and Nyamu-Musembi, C. (2004.) “Putting the ‘rights-based approach’ to development in perspective.” Third World Quarterly. 25(8):1415-1437.
[4] Gunn, Dwyer. “Is there a market for ‘conscious capitalists’?” New York Times, 7 May 2009. Available at http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/07/is-there-a-market-for-conscious-capitalists/