HO, GHANA – Nadia Nyarko, 17, is in her fourth year studying general arts at Mawuko Girls Senior High School, a boarding school in Volta, a region in southeastern Ghana. She also volunteers as a peer educator with Village Exchange International/Ghana, VEG, a nonprofit organization that aims to provide small loans, income-generating projects, and sexual and reproductive health information to young women in Ho, the capital of Volta.
Nyarko says that Village Exchange Ghana has helped her greatly through the club it has formed at her school.
“This is because we have been able to form a club in the school known as a peer counseling club,” she says.
The club provides the opportunity for the students to learn about issues related to young people, such as reproductive health. It also prompts them to think about future careers and share ideas about how best they can achieve their goals in life.
As a peer educator, Nyarko says she helps manage the club at her school and shares with her fellow students what she’s learned at the organization, based on the belief that young people are more likely to listen to their peers than adults. She says she has helped educate young women about how the choices they make in life will affect them. She says that this may be the only place where she and her peers have such opportunities to learn lessons pertaining specifically to young women.
“The outside world is different,” she says. “We all might not get this chance when we leave school, so the basis is good for us all.”
Nyarko says volunteering for the organization has not only enabled her to teach others but has also inspired her to consider her own future. After she finishes school, Nyarko says she hopes to volunteer with the United Nations Population Fund, UNFPA, which supports Village Exchange Ghana in programs related to reproductive health.
“I have a lot of dreams, and one of that is to become an international barrister,” she says, smiling.
Nyarko says that young girls need role models in order to learn positive behaviors that will help them reach their goals. She says young people, and young girls especially, face a lot of challenges, such as negative peer influence and other social deviances that lead them away from these goals.
She says she is lucky to have the opportunity to be exposed to various mentors in organizations such as Village Exchange Ghana. As a young peer educator, she says she looks up to “Aunt Emily,” or Emily Adevor, who is one of the directors of Village Exchange Ghana.
“I like Aunt Emily because she is always there for the young girls and serves as a mentor to us,” Nyarko says. “As much as she criticizes us, she does that to ensure our best interest, especially because we are girls and we need a lot of direction.”
She says her teachers also provide crucial guidance.
“In addition, our teachers have also been of great help, especially our headmistress, Ms. Denis Akwasi Attei,” she says.
Volunteers at Village Exchange Ghana say the center aims to empower young women through various initiatives, such as microfinance projects. The center also provides a space for children to study and play after school. Volunteers say the center is one of the few organizations that operate in Ghana’s remote regions, and they urge other organizations to expand their services into these areas in order to provide more opportunities to more youth across the country. To do this, though, they say the center needs more volunteers and supplies.
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