What is most times considered as witchcraft in Ghana and Africa may actually be science, the Executive Director of the Centre for Indigenous Knowledge and Organisational Development (CIKOD), Mr Bern Guri, has stated.
He said, �As Africans we have our own science. The thing we call witchcraft, if we are patient and we look at it, I am sure we can learn something from it.�
Mr Guri, who was speaking at the 44th edition of the National Level Learning Alliance Platform (NLLAP) last Tuesday on �Perspectives in endogenous development and indigenous sciences: Potentials and Challenges for Community-led Development�, said indigenous ways of doing things had now been discarded for foreign methods that were not working.
Telling participants that a scientist he met in Europe said he had been funded by his government to study how a cattle herder was able to communicate to his cattle, he said, �Come to Accra and tell [everyone] that this boy speaks to a cow and they will say that he is a [wizard] and it will fade off, but that is science.�
�That is what we call African science. That is why we should be talking about sciences and not science.�
He said it was to enable them study such rare phenomenon that Europeans and Americans had established many research centres, where they were repackaged and brought back to Africa �and it becomes science for us.�
Endogenous Development
Explaining Endogenous Development (ED) as the use of traditional knowledge, culture and systems to implement modern methods, Mr Guri said quick results had now become the order of the day, contrary to the employment of traditional methods where things took time, and which was why indigenous development was dying out.
He said to strengthen endogenous development and for communities to benefit more from that, there was the need to recognise and appreciate the indigenous institutions, resources and cultural heritage in the communities.
�If you can respect this, if you can identify them and you can make communities realise that this is good, that is the starting point for endogenous development,� he charged the participants.
Mr Guri listed social factors, norms, believes, traditional leaders, the family system, clan and households as traditional institutions in Africa.
�The youth in particular think that to be African means backwardness. Everybody wants to go to America and the UK, wear jeans and look like the people they see on television,� he added.
Environmental Sanitation challenges
Speaking to why and how WaterAid in Ghana (WAG) employed endogenous development in its work, the Country Representative, Dr Afia Zakiya, said her organisation had come to know that there were meanings attached to sanitation and hygiene just like any other concepts that were connected to people in society.
These cultural meanings shape people�s perceptions and attitude towards water, sanitation and Hygiene.
Presenting an overview of the 2010 Environmental Sanitation Policy, Mr Ibrahim Musah, the Head of Policy and Partnership, WAG, listed some of the challenges to environmental sanitation in the country as inadequate investments into the sector and the ineffective management of liquid and solid waste.
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