Our Activities

Service Areas

AAP’s project work ranges from the more traditional children’s projects of children’s ministry and evangelism, enrolling them in schools, and free primary health care. Our work is always demand driven and holistic; by this we mean we only work where local people are asking for our support, and we always address a problem from all angles. This means it is not easy to fit AAPs’ work in to a neat box. The two ways in which we differentiate and evaluate our work are by service areas and project types.

By service areas we mean the kind of services our work delivers to the community. We have three key service areas; Child Evangelism: education, childcare, Micro finance and Economic Empowerment: family income generation, Skill Training, Farmers Support, Trading Loans and Water and Health: Health care, hygiene. By project types we mean how a project is designed and what its purpose is. We have three types of projects: core, partner and sustainability.

Evangelism and Missions (AAP’s Core Mission)

It is encouraging to know that over 10,000 people especially children learn of the Saviour each year through all forms of outreach. AAP is committed to taking the wonderful message of the Gospel to all people including children. While there is much to thank God for in the growth of the Children’s ministries, still today countless thousands of people including children across Ghana grow up not hearing of the Lord Jesus Christ and His salvation. Materialism and selfishness are the spirit of the age, leaving no room for God.

In pushing the Great Commission under the Evangelism and Missions Programme, various projects have been designed towards this end;

• Church Planting and Rural Missions
• The Ministry of Excellence Conference
• Child Evangelism (Children’s Ministry/ distribution of Christian literature)
• Open Air Evangelism and Jesus Film Show
• Radio Ministry (Life Radio)

AAP is a Bible-centred organization composed of born again believers. Our mission is to train and equip Christians around the world to evangelise unreached children with the Word of God, disciple them and establish them in a local Bible-believing church. This is accomplished through:

• Child Evangelism and Teaching materials

• Direct ministries with children

• Training of Christian leaders, and ministers.

Other important projects under this programme include Jesus film show which is done mostly in our water project areas; and our Radio Ministry. No donation is too small to save a soul.

Micro Finance and Economic Empowerment

Indeed, the concept of microfinance is not new in Ghana. There has always been the tradition of people saving and/or taking small loans from individuals and groups within the context of self-help to start businesses or farming ventures. For example, available evidence suggests that the first credit union in Africa was established in Northern Ghana in 1955 by Canadian Catholic missionaries. Microfinance is thus one of the critical dimensions of the broad range of financial tools for the poor, and its increasing role in development has emanated from a number of key factors that include:

• The fact that the poor need access to productive resources, with financial services being a key resource, if they are to be able to improve their conditions of life;

• The realization that the poor have the capacity to use loans effectively for income-generation, to save and re-pay loans;

• The recognition that microfinance can have significant impact on cross cutting issues such as women's empowerment, reducing the spread of HIV/AIDS and environmental degradation as well as improving social indicators such as education, housing and health. Studies have shown that micro-finance plays three broad roles in development:

• It helps very poor households meet basic needs and protects against risks,

• It is associated with improvements in household economic welfare,

• It helps to empower women by supporting women's economic participation and help them to play their God-given role as help mates.

By providing material capital to a poor person, their sense of dignity is strengthened and this can help to empower the person to participate in the economy and society (Otero, 1999).

The following projects under Microfinance and Economic Empowerment seek to empower the poor and vulnerable to live decent lives.

• Micro Credit and Trading Loans

Despite the undeniably positive effect of microfinance on the lives of the poor, increasing income and assets alone does not effectively address daily health issues that often prevent movement out of the cycle of poverty. A majority of microfinance clients still have an insufficient understanding of health issues related to nutrition, family planning, childcare, sanitation, HIV/AIDS and others. Providing health education to the poor is a critical avenue of learning that can reduce vulnerabilities and alleviate poverty.

By integrating health education with microfinance community groups we can create a synergistic effect between the two, helping the poor to protect against and cope with health and financial shocks, seize economic opportunities, meet life-cycle needs and build assets. It is clear that sustainable microfinance for the very poor is the best tool we have for economic empowerment and when financial services are integrated with health education, it can dramatically enhance movement out of poverty.

• Skill Training

AAP, as a Christian Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) periodically organizes skills training in soap production, pomade, and cloth making for the beneficiary communities. The skill training project is a demonstration of love by AAP to teach the people “how to fish”.

The socio-economic values of Africa particularly in Ghana makes women vulnerable in terms of access to resources and decision making although they constitute about 51 per cent of the country’s population, it is therefore imperative that government, NGOs, women advocate groups and the Church among others step up efforts to reverse the status quo through advocacy and gender mainstreaming. AAP seeks to the empowering of women through capacity and skills training. At the end of the training, we grant micro- credit facilities to women groups to enable them set up small scale businesses. This project aims to promote the holistic development of females especially the poor, under privileged, distressed and marginalized in society.

• Farmers Support

WATER AND HEALTH

More than nine million people have no access to safe drinking water in Ghana. In many rural communities, water, which constitutes about 70% of the human body according to scientists, is one of the scarcest commodities. During the wet season, unsafe sources of water get more contaminated by run-off water from polluted sites. In the dry season, even contaminated water becomes scarce since the streams usually dry up. This compels especially women and children to walk over long distances to look for water for all domestic chores including drinking.

They usually carry very big pans and containers to enable them carry as much water as possible. The heavy load on their heads, the long distance to walk, and other chores to perform during the day compound their already fragile health problems and reduces their productivity. Water related diseases are therefore very prevalent in these communities. Nevertheless these are human beings created in the image of God by all standards who need to live like others. AAP Ghana therefore feels the urgent need to intervene to restore to these deprived masses some hope by supporting them to access potable water. This we do through identifying local partners who are located inside or closer to these poor communities and supporting them to deliver quality water provision services to our target communities.

Two main projects have been designed to tackle these identified water and health related problems;

• Water and Hygiene

Construction and Rehabilitation of Bore Holes

Africa Assistance Plan’s long standing relationship with donors around the globe on our water and health program, have provided and promoted quality health in Ghana and other African countries. Provision of bore holes and rehabilitation of broken-down bore holes in deprived communities are the activities undertaken to promote this programme and to ensure that people from poor, deprived areas have access to potable water and have quality health to engage in productive work to earn a decent living.

Hygiene Promotion

Many Ghanaians seem ignorant of the effects of bad hygiene practices on their own health. People defy many simple preventive health practices and later find themselves victims of their own ignorance. People do not wash their hands before eating or after visiting the latrine; people defecate in the open close to their own residence; People throw refuse in open drains; people do not store their drinking water in clean containers etc. Ghana's health authorities have said that about 80% of diseases in the country are preventable since they are caused mainly by high-risk hygiene behaviours and bad eating habits.

You would not like to blame some of them - in fact majority of them - for the simple reason that "they do not know what they are doing" as Hosea perfectly put it, “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge” There is therefore the need to promote safe hygiene behaviour in the communities. AAP - Ghana, through her partners, contributes to solving this health problem by adopting an integrated water, sanitation and hygiene promotion approach. By this approach, any community that benefits from our water provision services also benefits from sanitation and hygiene promotion services to enable them maximize the health benefits of these services.

• Promotion of Primary Health Care

The AAP has observed that the strength of the nation rests in the health of its people and therefore their good health becomes a proper concern of the citizenry. It has been indicated that healthy people will live more rewarding, happier, and thus more productive lives. Deaths from infectious diseases have diminished and that during the past year important progress has been made in dealing with such diseases as worm infestation, poliomyelitis, diarrhoea, dysentery, cholera, tuberculosis and other skin diseases in our operational communities through our various health promotion exercises and activities.

It is believed that these achievements represent a major gain for the future well-being of countless Ghanaians. As a Christian organization, we are doing much less now than we could to reduce the impact of disease. Many Africans cannot afford to pay the cost of medical care when it is needed and that they are not protected by adequate health insurance. Worm infestation, body sores and other water borne diseases are the basic health problems facing inhabitants in rural Ghana and other rural places in Africa especially younger children. Most of the youth in the various communities are gradually abandoning the villages due to this major water and health problem. It is in this light that AAP intervene with this project through deworming exercises; distribution of vitamins to school children and pregnant women; other drugs are provided base on need and prescription by our medical consultants.