Featured image for “5 more Academies took place in Ghana during the month of July!”

August 13, 2018

5 more Academies took place in Ghana during the month of July!

During the month of July, 5 Plant-for-the-Planet Academies took place in Ghana. The 1st academy took place on 06/07/2018 and the last academy was carried out on the 11/07/2017. All the 5 academies were located in the Northern region of Ghana.

The realization of the Academies brought great moments to all the participating schools as they felt respected and glad to be contacted for such an educative program.

The starting time for most of the academies was between 8am and 9 am although some academies started shortly after 9am due to unexpected complications. The Academy's teams usually arrived some minutes earlier to arrange the venue to the Academies. All of the academies’ closure time was set around 5 pm.

We began the Academies with an introduction by the Program Coordinator and his team, to provide the children and teachers with a general idea of the program, what to expect from us and what we expected from them. Thenceforth we distributed T-shirts to all the participants and the invited Climate Justice Ambassador started his presentation assisted by a moderator. Afterwards, we carried out all the Academy’s modules with the children and at the end each children received the Tree by Tree book as well as a well-earned Climate Justice Ambassador Certificate.

During the 5 academies we had 80 children attending to each academy. In other words 8 children from 10 different schools were invited to take part in each academy making up a total of 400 participants after the organization of all the academies.

The main takeaway from the Academy is to learn how the greenhouse gases affect our environment and how we can reduce the CO2 found in the atmosphere. For instance, the plantation of trees serves as an additional carbon sink and helps reducing the amount of CO2 from the clean air. The Academies are also important to teach the children how to plant trees and take care of them, the children are also encouraged to plant more trees afterwards. Due to time constraints, in some academies we just showed the children and teachers how to plant trees and provided them with the trees that had not been planted so that they could plant them later on.

Moreover, the children learned about the world distribution of population, income and carbon emissions by taking part in the “World Game”; they discussed questions regarding how to raise awareness of the Climate Crisis and lastly they were trained to give presentations to the invited guests, parents and colleagues at the end of the Academy session.

Overall, 394 trees were planted during the celebration of the 5 Academies; most of them were mango trees. We had prominent people coming by thanks to the invitations that we had sent them beforehand, mainly the children’s parents.

By taking part of the Academy and seeing the energy and engagement of the children we realized the importance of helping them to become Climate Justice Ambassadors. All the 5 Academies were fun and educative.