The wind of change blowing through Ghana’s villages (commentary)

Sefwi Wiawso doesn’t feature in Ghana’s tourist guides. Its main town, Wiawso, is little more than a single road — albeit one bursting with vitality and color, with hawkers selling their wares and people milling about in animated conversations. But being off the beaten track — or, more specifically, an eight-hour drive west of Ghana’s capital city, Accra — is no measure of the district’s significance. “So many of our natural resources come from this area: timber, cocoa, gold, food crops,” says Raymond Ennin, an enthusiastic 30 year-old community activist with local environmental and resources NGO Civic Response. “The region supports the rest of Ghana, but the people aren’t seeing enough of the benefits.” Until now, most of the proceeds from sales of the natural resources harvested in Sefwi Wiawso have gone into a few pockets, Ennin explains as we drive out of Wiawso along undulating red dirt roads. We pass tropical forests where the vegetation is so dense it seems to be in a state of rapture. Heavy trucks laden with timber rumble by, deepening the crevices in the already rutted road. The trucks represent a tiny cog in the wheel of an industry that is crucial to Ghana’s economic health, accounting for about 11 percent of export earnings. For decades, though, the timber sector has been rife with illegality and corruption. In 2004 alone it is estimated that Ghana lost more revenue from illegal logging — $100 million (€83,271,000) — than it received in development aid. Endemic illegality…

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