Empowering the Girl-Child with GLOBE program
Why wait for girls to become women before they are empowered and built with capacity to become ambassadors for environmental sustainability? We at A Rocha Ghana (ARG) are “catching them young” and hoping they “will be champions of environmental conservation and protection forever.”
With the introduction of the Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment (GLOBE) Programme, ARG in partnership with the Centre for Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Services (CERSGIS) and the West Gonja District Education Service are empowering girls in both basic and second cycle schools to have hands-on environmental science training.
GLOBE is an international science programme that encourages and supports students, teachers and scientists to collaborate on inquiry-based investigations of their local environment, sharing results in person and virtually through local, regional and international science symposia.
Students enrolled under the GLOBE programme automatically become members of the Schools Environmental Club.
At the Saint Anne’s SHS, the team interacted with 9 students―the first science class the school has had since its inception in 2003. The school which is located in the outskirts of town and away from the bustle, was instituted purposely to provide a window of hope to the Girl-Child.
The team from ARG and CERSGIS schooled the students on what both institutions stood for and what they (the students) stand to gain as GLOBE ambassadors. After the interaction is was obvious the students were poised for a journey to becoming GLOBE ambassadors.
At the Ndewura Jakpa SHS, the warm welcome was no different from what we had received at St. Anne’s. The girls were very much excited about the programme and thus their interest to know more about GLOBE.
Tutors at both schools thanked ARG and CERSGIS for the visit and urged them not to relent in drawing their attention to any other opportunities that would improve the knowledge and technical knowhow of students.
Students enrolled under the GLOBE programme automatically become members of the Schools Environmental Club.
GLOBE is an international science and education program designed to increase environmental awareness of people throughout the world and to contribute to improved understanding of the local, regional, and global environment.
Fundamental to the process is linking students and scientists as collaborators. Approximately 12,000 schools in 97 countries are currently GLOBE partners.
The program aims to improve student achievement in science and mathematics and clearly supports better learning in geography and enhanced educational use of technology. GLOBE provides protocols for numerous measurements within four main investigation areas: weather and climate, land cover, soils and water quality.
After students collect and submit their data either by e-mail or the Internet, the data are archived and made publicly available to everyone throughout the world. The scientist-student interaction provides incentive for the students to study environmental questions while helping create spatially and temporally useful data sets for scientific research.