How We Work

“We still work like we started – burning passion, mission-driven and closely learning.  One strength of ATE is the ability to reflect on our programmes and to help one another grow. No one is left behind.”

Gabriel Maanibe, Strategic Advisor

Action Through Enterprise is a vibrant charity working in Sub-Saharan Africa, with over thirty staff operating from our base in Lawra district, Upper West Ghana, and three staff in the UK. We function as one team, collaborating with rural communities to drive our current projects and future plans.

Our strategy is to provide our full range of integrated support – around education, inclusion and enterprise – through establishing community hubs in rural communities. This Hub Model represents ten years of learning and listening, understanding that the problems people face are interconnected. Working within a community in all these areas helps more than just the individual directly benefitting. It’s transformational for the family and the community as a whole.

The Hub Model

 

Our focus today is on expanding to rural communities (where we can have most impact), engaging with the community through schools and PTAs, businesses, social groups and tribal leaders.

We assign a dedicated Hub Manager who builds relationships and leads on project delivery. Introducing school meals is usually our entry point, allowing us to immediately impact and collaborate with a large number of people.

Next, we’ll identify and support often hidden disabled children, offering practical help, pastoral care and a place to meet. We’ll also identify small businesses where a financial grant and ongoing mentoring would help them become sustainable and bring wealth into the community.

Quarterly community meetings enable people to feedback and influence the work, and over time we’ll introduce other locally-driven programmes, such as dry season farming, apprenticeships and gender equality projects.

Everything is achieved in lockstep with the local community – it doesn’t work any other way. This is not the kind of development which is ‘done to’ people – this is long-term, sustainable development, led by the needs, skills and input of each community it touches.

With the opening of Kalsagri Hub in 2023, we are two years ahead of our target to ensure that every individual in the district of Lawra can access our work should they want to. Now, we are looking to apply our well-honed model to bring opportunities to other districts in the Upper West – and work is about to begin on building relationships with the people of Nandom (the district north of Lawra), as part of four-year cycle of launching and growing new Hubs, strengthening our Ghana team and transforming more lives.

“Lawra has become a Centre of Excellence for Action Through Enterprise, a benchmark of high impact work that will inspire and inform our every move, as we work with new communities.”

Sarah Gardner, Chief Executive

Registered charity: 1149988