Volunteer work in Africa

In some ways South Africa is different from the rest of Africa as there is less poverty and strife here. South Africa is home to some of the most spectacular game reserves and landscapes. Considered as the adventure capital of the world, South Africa offers many pleasures from the Gold Reef city in Johannesburg to hiking across the scenic route of N12.

It is known as the rainbow nation and has a diverse range of activities to offer and places to see. One of the most popular destinations in South Africa is the Kruger National Park, which is the icon of African Safari.

The Kruger National park is home to several lion prides, herds of wild elephants and thousands of other small and bid animals and birds. From spotting the elusive leopard at Sabi Sands to watching the lion pride enjoy a meal in the Mala Mala, this national park is one fairy tale ride. The Sun City and the Garden route are two attractions that you can afford to miss. The garden route is a natural theme park that is home to Dolphins and whales and if you are lucky enough, you might end up with a pearl of your own.

Why Volunteer In South Africa
South Africa lies deep in a myriad of colors that vary from the different cultures to the different flora and fauna that lies in the heart of this magnificent country.

Types Of Projects Available in South Africa
As a part of volunteering in South Africa, you will get to choose the kind of project you are interested in. The different types if projects available include:

- Wild Coast wildlife conservation project: This is one of a kind project, which will bring out the best in you. As a part of volunteering in South Africa, you will be surrounded by the stunning and awe-inspiring wild coast that stretches from Durban to East London. Situated in the Transkei homeland, it has some dramatic coastlines and will including working at the base camp as well as on the field. The age requirement for this project varies from 18-40 years.

As a part of volunteering in South Africa, you will get different opportunities to work with wildlife under this project. You will get the opportunity to learn about the South African big cats and other wildlife during your stay. The different activities that you will be involved with as a part of volunteering in South Africa includes:
1. Patrolling the fence and looking for and removing snares and any other threat to the wildlife. Also assist in fence management as well as maintenance.
2. Assist in removing any alien vegetation and help towards controlling soil erosion
3. Wildlife research as well as monitoring their activity
4. Interaction with the locals and other monitoring activity of elephants
5. Working at the rearing centre for lion cubs
6. Attending as well as giving lectures on environmental issues and wildlife management
7. Participating in bush walks and taking game drives to help in identification of different species and interpreting their behaviors.
8. Assisting in cultivation of indigenous plants in a nursery. These plants will later on be used for rehabilitating the erosion sites.
9. Creating a catalogue of birds by monitoring their activity, breeding and behaviors.

- Wildlife Research and Rehabilitation: As a part of volunteering in South Africa, you will be handling different wildlife research activities. You will be assisting field supervisors in the following:
1. Capturing of wild animals for collar tags and releasing them in the wild.
2. Observing complex procedures done on wild animals especially if they are injured
3. Grooming horses
4. Rehabilitation work on various animals including lions and cheetahs
5. Learning the coastal systems as well as the ecology and developing an understanding of the coastal dynamics
6. Assisting other volunteers and staff on various local community projects
7. Working with experienced staff in wildlife identification and identifying behavioral changes

Volunteer in South Africa Requirements
Age: The minimum age for volunteering in South Africa should be 18 or older.

Volunteer in South Africa Fee and Other details
There is a fee attached to each of the projects that you volunteer for. The fee is charged in advance and is charged for the following:

1. Accommodation
2. Emergency evacuation services
3. Food/meals
4. Travel insurance
5. Transportation within the region
6. Emergency support
7. All types of training material
8. Supervision by local staff
9. Orientation on arrival

Senegal

As previously suggested there is diving in Senegal. I spent a couple of weeks there last November and dived with Club Oceanium in Dakar run by Pascal. They run guided dives on a weekday and on a weekend you are welcome to dive with the local dive club on their club dives. The club consists mainly of French ex-pats and they are a very friendly and welcoming bunch. Let me know if you need the contact details.

There is also diving available in Sierra Leone with an ex-pat Italian guy called Franco who runs a bar/resteraunt on one of the beaches just outside Freetown. He has limited kit for hire and a couple of rhibs. He will charter it with a skipper for you during the week or you can join a group on a weekend.

All this however is probably a little too far North for you.

West Africa Recreation

Anyone out there know of any recreational diving that goes on around West Africa areas??
I often find myself here for work and with the typical logistical nightmare West Africa is, I doubt if there is anything going on but you never know!!
I often work in Gabon,Cameroon,Equtorial Guniea,Nigeria or Ghana.
There are a lot of offshore oil expats working here. I wonder if anyone has managed to ship any diving gear through the wonderfull customs that operate here??
Waters are very clear offshore and there are BIG fish to be seen, but the police also have BIG guns!!
Let me know if there is any mad expats blowing bubbles in West Africa, thanks

Gap Year Placements

Work and learnGap Year Ghana projects are personally selected and monitored. We do not have as many volunteer work placements as some large gap year organizations. But because we are involved, we can be sure that work placements are well managed and rewarding.

English language and maths teaching
You can choose to volunteer in one of two two types of schools. Poor schools in villages and shanty towns are usually simple shacks with few facilities and up to 40 children per class, often with a wide age range. This is less challenging than it sounds because pupils are fantastically eager to learn. School volunteer work placements can also be made in middle class schools, much better equipped though classes may also be large. Again, you will find the pupils much more enthusiastic than their British equivalents.

Bringing materials and ideas from home can really help your progress. Nothing fancy - Ghanaian pupils will probably be thrilled to discover your favourite story book, or simple science experiments (e.g. what is a saturated solution) . Gap Year Ghana is keen to promote extra-curricular activites in Ghanaian schools, where the main focus is on the three Rs. Students with special skills, for example musicians and chess players, are therefore especially welcome on this gap year programme.

Ghana and expoloring West Africa

Volunteering on a Placement Overseas in Ghana
Ghana is an intensely colourful land on the West coast of Africa. Once the British colony known as the 'Gold Coast', it is renowned for the friendliness and warmth of its people. Ghana has great beaches, wild savannah and dense rainforests. This English-speaking country provides volunteers with a wonderful introduction to Africa; it is politically-stable, safe, affordable and rewarding to visit.

All Projects Abroad Ghana volunteers live with local host families. The combination of Ghanaians' strong religious faith and hospitality makes living with a family a special experience.

African traditions combined with British influences have produced an exciting modern Ghanaian culture – open, musical and diverse. Although Ghana is a poor country, in recent times it has attracted new money and many Ghanaians are now returning home from abroad, bringing new investment and ideas with them.

Certainly, life in Ghana will enable you to encounter some unusual situations, from the unpredictable electricity and water supply, to seeing even the poorest families dressed up in their best clothes for church on a Sunday morning. You will also need to adapt to the bizarre and the unfamiliar, whether it be the car-shaped coffins or the banku and fufu you will have for lunch.

Volunteer Travel and Tourism in Ghana
Living in vibrant, colourful Ghana will feel like an explosion; an enchanting sensory overload. Music is a central part of Ghanaian culture, so in the bigger towns - especially Accra - you will hear some great live bands and have some memorable nights out.

There are many, many attractions and places to visit. You will want to see the slave forts and spend a night in the rainforest at Kakum Rainforest Reserve, feed wild monkeys at The Boebeng Monkey Village or elephant watch at Mole National Park. If you’re even more adventurous, consider the challenge of a journey to Timbuktu.

Travel across Ghana is cheap and easy, whether it be in a taxi, a tro-tro (a sort of minibus) or on a lake boat. There are clean, affordable places to stay and eat in all the main towns.

Ghana is a superb location for bird watching and is developing a good ecotourism philosophy. It’s also an interesting place for history lovers and, once your overseas voluntary work is over, it’s a great stepping-off point from which to explore West Africa

Voluntary work in West Africa

Ghana is an exciting and popular place to spend some time on a volunteer project or work experience placement. Our voluntary projects in Ghana are available for anyone interested in volunteering in the developing world, including those on a gap year, career break or as summer work experience while studying.

Projects Abroad has many projects in Ghana, based in Accra, Cape Coast, Kumasi, Ho and the Akuapem Hills. Volunteers work on a wide range of projects including Teaching, Care, Culture & Community – including Building and IT Projects, Medical & Healthcare Projects – including Medicine, Physiotherapy, Nursing, Midwifery and Dentistry, Journalism, Veterinary Medicine, Sports, Business, and Law & Human Rights.

There are overseas voluntary work opportunities in hospitals, orphanages, newspapers, schools, sports clubs, veterinary practices and radio stations around Accra, Ghana’s capital city. We also have teaching, care and medical volunteer projects based along the coast in Cape Coast, in the ancient Ashanti capital, Kumasi and the capital of the lush Volta region, Ho. The Akuapem Hills (a more rural location) hosts further medical, care, culture & community and many teaching projects.

Working in West Africa

Before I go further, I have to state that I have been working with West Africa (WA) for the past 16 years from Freetown, Sierra Leone and covered especially the western realm of the West African region (one can check any prominent NGO, African studies outfits, universities/colleges, diplomatic missions, think tanks or any global government institute (s)�the Canadian Ministry of Immigration and Citizenship, for instance, has been subscribing for WA for the past 30-something years).

Gye Nyame Concord has done well in bringing the troubles of WA out for public knowledge, especially in the local and global Ghanaian community. I am indicating Ghana more specifically because WA is legally owned by Ghana (Before Ghana, Nigeria had owned it. And before Nigeria the British colonial regimes in West Africa had owned it). It is unfortunate that the poor management by the Accra-based Daily Graphic has brought WA down. It reveals also how Daily Graphic itself is managed.

Based in Ottawa, Canada for the past ten years and working via computer-assisted/online reporting tools (a new genre in journalism largely developed by the United States), I don�t know most of the guys down there in Accra, though my colleagues such as Sierra Leone�s Desmond Davies, the editor, Ghana�s Frank Afful, the Managing Editor, and Ghana�s Bernard Otabil, the business editor, and other staff workers in our London office, who have not been paid for almost one year, like me (I am owned almost $20,000.00), have been interacting with them. The Lagos, Nigeria-based correspondence, Ben Asante, is owned over ten thousands of British pounds sterling. Other correspondents, based in various parts of the world such as the Washington, U.S.-based James Butty (a Liberian), the Paris, France-based Ibrahim Seaga Shaw (a Sierra Leonean) and the Moscow-based correspondent, Kester Komelagah (a Ghanaian), have been communicating with me, complaining about their distresses. This atmosphere deeply undermined the enthusiasm of correspondents (Enthusiasm is one of the key elements in journalism�you may have the degrees in the world or write like Nigeria�s Wole Soyinka, if you don�t have it, you have to say bye, bye for the trade). I am revealing all these for short-changed subscribers of WA, as one Kwabena Yiadom-Boakye, wrote to ghanaweb.com, to understand the troubles WA went through before its slumber. WA was run in such a terribly abysmal way that it appears as if there were no managers. The Romanian owners did not trust the African editorial team, more out of racist reasons than incompetence or qualification�in fact, aside from me with Master�s degree from Canada�s Carleton University in Ottawa in journalism, most of the correspondents have Master�s degrees from diverse disciplines/or programs. The editor, Desmond Davies has Master�s degree in Mass Communication from U.K.�s Leicester University. In fact, Bernard Otabil, the business editor, has an MBA and repeatedly advised, or rather warned, the Romanians of the coming collapse of WA, to the extent of writing a realistic business proposal, pro bono, out of sheer zeal to help halt the declining WA but the Romanians, described variously as racists, did not take Otabil�s proposal seriously. Added to all these, as expected, both London and Accra officials of WA did not answer phone calls or e-mails or letters, a sign of poor management. In fact, almost all the Romanians who were moving through the offices of WA in London and Accra were semi-literate, have no understanding of a media outlet of WA�s range and operated it like what may be described as a Kumasi businessman/woman outfit--a buy and sell venture.

The value of reviving WA goes beyond any business novice with plentiful money-bag. As the chief mouthpiece of the entire West African region and as the forum for the discussion of West Africa�s development process, WA cannot be allowed to sleep in this crucial time of West Africa�s development history, where complicated development issues such the implications of juju-marabou, small arms proliferations, HIV/AIDS pandemic and other dreadful diseases, protracted security issues, poverty and cultural distresses call for a magazine of WA�s international calibre to explain West Africa�s development to West Africans (and Africans) and the rest of the world just as CNN, the BBC, Asia Week, International Herald Tribune, Time or Newsweek magazines do for the cause of the Western world�s development process. Still, in a region (and a continent) that is yet to not only understand each other but also do not know each other properly, WA remains the key regional outfit to do this based on its global reach, its clout, its history, its culture, its qualifications, and its experiences--a strategically sound value and vision for a region that is ranked by global institutions such as the United Nations as the poorest in the world. While Ghana has put WA to sleep (which reveals Accra�s low development vision and management), West African governments, private businessmen/women, ECOWAS, the African Union (AU) and other governments outside West Africa can take over WA for the good of the region and the continent.

WA is a highly profitable outfit if managed properly on sound business principles. In fact, as I have discussed variously with my WA and other African/non-African colleagues, if managed well there is a huge market in the United States (Some colleagues tell me the continental European market has not been properly exploited for business). A Spanish or French edition, like Jeune Afrique or Time or Newsweek magazines, has huge market internationally not only in the western hemisphere but the increasing African population in the diaspora who are thirsty for sound analytical news about West Africa, Africa and diasporan Africans (Anthropologically and historically, most African-Caribbeans, African-South Americans and African-North Americans originally came from West Africa). An editorial policy based on these could open up huge markets for the profitability of WA in the long run.

Let those involved in reviving WA move on, driven by West Africa�s development process and the global development game being motored by today�s information system, and through this, help reinvigorate the region�s elements for progress