ADDRESS BY THE DISTRICT GOVERNOR OF ROTARY INTERNATIONAL DISTRICT 9102, JEFFERY AFFUL AT THE LAUNCH OF THE SIXTIETH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION OF ROTARY IN GHANA. MONDAY OCTOBER 22, 2018.

Past Rotary International Director Sam Okudzeto; Past District Governors Adotei Brown, Robert Atta, Winfried Mensah and Sam Worentetu; District Governor Nominee Yvonne Kumoji Darko; Rotary Partners; ladies and gentlemen of the media; fellow Rotarians; invited guests; sixty years ago to the day, Wednesday October 24 1958, the first Rotary Club was founded in Ghana.

What is Rotary; you may want to ask? Rotary, the world’s first service club, was founded in Chicago, Illinois, United States of America on February 23, 1905 with four individuals. Over the next one hundred and thirteen years of its history, it now has a world membership of over one million two hundred thousand in more than thirty five thousand clubs in over two hundred countries and geographical areas.

Rotary came to Ghana by the foresight, commitment and dedication of a non-Rotarian individual by name Michael Dan Quist, who in the course of his employment at Mobil Oil Company and later Texaco Oil Company, an American oil giants in the twentieth century became familiarized with Rotary and Rotarians and believed that his newly independent country, Ghana could benefit from a service organisation such as Rotary.

As the saying goes, the rest is history. It is that history we want to reflect on; to justify our stake in it today; and to look into the several more sixty years of Rotary DOING GOOD IN THE WORLD.

Ladies and gentlemen of the media over the past sixty years since the founding of the first club, the Rotary Club of Accra, in Ghana with twenty eight charter members, Rotary has grown in Ghana to forty-nine clubs in all the ten regions of Ghana with membership of over one thousand five hundred. It is from Ghana that Rotary extended to Nigeria with clubs formed in Kano, Lagos and Ibadan and also in Lome, Togo; all by the Rotary Club of Accra.

Rotary Service.

In the sixty years of Rotary in Ghana, clubs and their members have lived the Rotary primary motto of Service Above Self. We have played very major roles in various socio-economic spheres of life in Ghana. Projects, too many to enumerate have been undertaken by all the clubs in Ghana. Let me however mention a couple of them that may perhaps not be obvious to some. The Plastic and Reconstruction Unit of the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital was started with Rotary collaboration. Other Rotary interventions in the health sector include the Eye Clinic at the St. Dominic Hospital at Akwatia, the Dental clinic at the Comboni Center in Sogakofe, the Out Patients Department (OPD) of the St. Joseph Hospital in Koforidua, The Labadi Cluster of Schools was started by Rotary, The Vaccine cold storage unit…..  to name a few

All of these aside, perhaps the largest Rotary intervention in the health sector in Ghana was first, the advocacy of Rotary to get the Ministry of Health of Ghana to adopt the National Immunization Days (NIDs) as the surest way to eliminate polio; and second, the partnership that was forged together with the Ghana Health Service, World Health Organisation, Unicef and others to successfully stop the transmission of the polio virus in Ghana. The ubiquitous “End Polio” T-Shirt, a sample of which I have here was a sight in every nook and cranny of Ghana. Happily, I can say that, by Rotary’s pioneering advocacy role and support for the programme, the last case of polio in Ghana was recorded on November 8, 2008, ten years ago. In the area of support for Polio Eradication alone, Rotary has spent about nine million US Dollars directly in Ghana from 1996 to date.

Several villages and towns in Ghana now have boreholes from which the beneficiary communities draw better quality water for use. Currently, Rotary in collaboration with         USAID is undertaking a US$4million Water and Sanitation project in 6 regions of Ghana. Ie, Greater Accra, Eastern, Western, Northern, Volta and Central Regions.  This is a follow up to a similar project, albeit on a smaller scale of 2m US$ that was undertaken successfully a couple of years ago.

In the area of Basic Education and Literacy, there is hardly a region in Ghana that has not been touched by Rotary’s intervention through the building of schools, such as the La Wireless Schools Early Learning Centre; to the supply of books, computers, teaching and learning materials.

Several clubs have programmes directed at Mother and Child Health throughout the country. Some of the interventions are the on going natal clinic project at Malam Atta market and a completed health centre for the  Nyanyanor community .

Through our programmes on Peace and Conflict Prevention and Resolution, Rotary is constantly developing the human resource capacity in our society by  offering scholarships to deserving practitioners in the sector, tenable in our specialised faculties in other parts of the world. Currently we have ….. such beneficiaries in sessions.

Ladies and gentlemen of the media, two years ago, Rotary launched the Punctuality and Time Management Project to help wean our society off the rather dubious “Ghana Man Time”, syndrome under our Economic and Community Development area of focus. Perhaps in the not too distant future you will be invited to a workshop on this subject since you are the natural partners for projects like this to succeed. A number of events in the past few days point to how Rotary can collaborate with you in the media to be change agents on this score. 

Ladies and gentlemen of the media as Rotarians, we believe also that “one profits most who serves best,” and we are committed to creating inroads with people so that opportunities to serve will arise from those connections. The Rotarian philosophy is that mutual service is the best way to create thriving businesses and societies. In this sixtieth anniversary celebration it is my most pleasant duty to invite you to use your very powerful tools of communication to help us deliver the Rotary message to the Ghanaian society for them to see how we affect the community; so they come join us to continue Doing Good in the World. To you of the media I lay a special welcome mat for you to join any of the forty-nine clubs in Ghana.

Thank you.