In the year of the Silver Jubilee Celebration of International Mother Language Day, let me share a story of one of the Silver Jubilee Projects of WinE Ghana....
About a month ago, I was privileged to be part of a project handing over team, on behalf of the Women in Engineering (WinE) wing of the Ghana Institution of Engineering, to visit Kpedzi. A fishing community in the Asuogyaman District of Ghana, Ewe is the main local language in Kpedzi, though many of the townsfolk understand and speak Twi too.
We successfully handed over 10 bio-digester toilets to the community as part of WinE's 25th Anniversary outreach initiative, and I must highlight that stakeholder engagements with the people in the local language contributed a great deal to this project.
I felt very honoured to have had the opportunity to serve as an interpreter when the team went to Kpedzi in July 2024, and again in February 2025. Engineers had come up with a solution that would be beneficial to the community. We however needed to break down the concept of a 'biodigester' in plain-language and also explain to the community how we needed their collaborative efforts to make this project a success. It was a joy to see how the faces of the locals lit up once they grasped the concepts in their local language.
Did you know that Ghana will need to construct about four million toilets in the next six years to achieve the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Six – 'Access to clean water and sanitation for all?' And this is just one aspect of all the goals we want to achieve as a nation. There's work to do!
Those who have interacted with me along work lines would know that SDG 17 is my favourite: it says "partnerships for the goals." I believe with the right collaborative efforts and partnerships, we, together, have what it takes to make the world a better place. There's a quote by Nelson Mandela that says, 'If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart.
Could it be that we have been sitting on our 'high horses' - attending many conferences and webinars, proving among ourselves who understands what better, etc. - and have neglected the acts of explaining 'simply', sometimes in local dialects, to our 'non- or low-English speaking' communities all the 'big things' we mean by words and phrases like 'climate change', 'resource efficiency', 'sustainability', 'renewable energy', 'recycling', 'reusing', 'biodegradable', etc. Albert Einstein put it this way - "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough."
I look forward to more collaborative efforts in Africa, using our local dialects to reach our communities, and achieving more together. Together, we can! Together, we'll move further!
#Ghanamonth #internationalmotherlanguageday #silverjubilee #SDGs #sustainability #communityoutreach #stakeholderengagements #GhIE #WinE
