Our Work
"Our economy for over a century has been depending largely on the production and export of raw materials. This cannot and will not create prosperity for the masses of Ghanaians... The countries that have made rapid progress around the world put education at the heart of their development."
Nana Akufo-Addo, President of Ghana, Sept, 2017
The issues we address
Drawing on her work in educational projects in northern Ghana, Anita Lowenstein Dent founded Teach2Teach International (T2T) in 2017 to respond to four social needs in some of the region’s poorest districts:
A severe lack of employment opportunities for young people, with youth unemployment is as high as 48%. This leads to rural-urban migration and slum dwelling, and to early or forced marriage.
Poor basic education provision, leading to huge class sizes of up to 200, and critical teacher deployment and absenteeism issues.
Poor basic education attainment for the most disadvantaged children, with literacy among primary school age children is as low as 9%.
Lack of opportunity for women, both for young girls in education and for young women after leaving education.
T2T in the global context
T2T’s work has a double-barrelled approach and directly responds to United Nations Sustainable Development Goals 4 and 8.
Goal 4: Quality Education - Obtaining a quality education is the foundation to improving people’s lives and sustainable development.
Goal 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth - Sustainable economic growth will require societies to create the conditions that allow people to have quality jobs.
We contribute to the global UN initiative of Education Cannot Wait which 'aims to reach all crisis-affected children and youth with safe, free and quality education by 2030.'
We sit within the context of UNICEF'S major initiative, Generation Unlimited, which calls on all governments, businesses, foundations, academia, non-profits, communities and innovators to “get every young person in school, training or age-appropriate employment by 2030”.
Our solution
We simultaneously address all four of these issues through our Community Volunteer Teacher Programme (CVTP).
Working in partnership with a highly respected local NGO - School for Life Ghana - and the Ghanaian Education Service (GES), we train talented but disadvantaged unemployed young Ghanaian women and men in deprived districts of northern Ghana to be excellent Community Volunteer Teachers (CVTs) in their own community primary schools.
We use cutting-edge, mother-tongue, accelerated educational methodology that achieves the same results in ten months that, using traditional methods, would take three years.