The parish of Buriton, near Petersfield in East Hampshire, has been developing strong links with a small community in rural Ghana for over ten years. From small beginnings, an innovative ‘Village-to-Village’ Group has been established to widen communications, awareness and support for the community of Dominase in the far north of Ghana’s Central Region.

Working with and through the democratically elected local authorities in both countries has become an important part of Buriton’s approach, leading to additional benefits and to the establishment of a formal link between Hampshire County Council, East Hampshire District Council and their counterparts in Ghana.

Buriton’s work has always attempted to address Millennium Development Goals.  Initially, the Hampshire residents helped provide a health clinic with a generator, medical supplies and funding for living quarters for a nurse.  Links between schools in the two communities were also amongst early achievements. 

Villagers in Buriton and Dominase subsequently agreed that another early priority should be to help improve supplies of clean water as living conditions in Dominase are fairly primitive and unhealthy, with only a few boreholes and wells to provide water supplies. 

By engaging with the local authority in Ghana (the Upper Denkyira West District Assembly) it has been possible for the Buriton group to link its support to local priorities and programmes – addressing gaps and avoiding duplication. 

Thanks to generous support from villagers and local businesses in Hampshire, it was possible to finance a number of new wells and boreholes.  Villagers in Dominase undertook all the hard work themselves - digging the 20-30 ft wells by hand - but money raised in Buriton helped pay for the materials needed to line the wells and to provide the pumps required. Each new well is capable of serving hundreds of people and, as well as saving lives, improved water supplies have meant that more children can go to school and more women can work.

When visiting Ghana, representatives from Buriton usually arrange to meet with the British High Commission and / or DFID as well as with the National Association of Local Authorities of Ghana (NALAG).  They have also met with Ghana’s Minister of Local Government, Rural Development and Environment. These relationships with UK and Ghanaian officials have helped to confirm the Village-to-Village priorities and to increase the scale of benefits. The high-level contacts in Ghana also encouraged UK local authorities to join the international initiative.  Members of the Buriton group fed this desire back to the Leaders of their County and District Council – and both answered the call in very positive fashion.

Whilst the Buriton group is currently initiating a coordinated programme of sanitation facilities in and around Dominase, the County and District Councils are working on economic development affairs. 

The Local Authority link, now part of the Commonwealth Local Government Forum’s ‘Good Practice Scheme’, is helping to promote a culture of self-sufficiency in Ghana – moving away from aid-dependency towards more confident, self-reliant local communities. Local economic development is vital to this cause and the UK Councils are providing small amounts of targeted practitioner expertise to help their counterparts in Ghana stimulate new local enterprises, build economic capacity and support sustainable local development. The expanded link is also helping to boost the role and standing of elected local democracy in the Upper Denkyira district, demonstrating good governance and showing how local authorities can bring partners together to tackle priority issues.

By linking with NALAG it will be possible to share the learning from the local links with other Local Authorities across Ghana – offering the opportunity to ‘scale-up’ the benefits of good practice and policy improvements.

From the small beginnings of Buriton’s ‘Village-to-Village’ link, the initiative is now beginning to strengthen local authority capacity to perform and deliver services which can, in turn, address Millennium Development Goals for many more Ghanaian communities. And in Hampshire, as well as potential trade and business connections, the links are helping to improve the understanding of global interconnections and of global citizenship both within and beyond the Councils.