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Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Library project in Ghana by Urban Design Group

Books and Light

Gaining access to books and study materials is a huge barrier to overcome in rural Ghana, which makes our library essential to wide spread student success. However, an often-overlooked challenge is access to light.

In the typical home in rural Ghana, two parents and three or more children share one or two small kerosene lamps for all household chores.

However, since Ghana is only a few degrees from the equator, 12 hours of each day are spent in darkness.

This means that each student must squeeze all farming, cooking, studying, water fetching, schooling, and recreation into half a day. Our library will be the only publicly available space for evening study, which will expand a student's ability to study by three to four hours a day—that is an extra 45 study days a year.