Let's Talk Human Rights

By Samantha Trajcevski

This past summer of 2024 I lived in Ghana! This blog will share my work and what I gained from such a unique summer. Words cannot describe how grateful I am to have been part of this once in a lifetime experience. As my advisor, Dr. Satang Nabaneh connected me to one of the HRC’s partners, the Initiative for Gender Equality and Development in Africa (IGED). I heard great things about IGED and was eager to see what interning abroad was like. 

I arrived in Ghana in May, 2024 and was met with open arms. I lived at Academic City University College with two UD students from the ETHOS program. Liesl Carter and Georgia Popovic-Ita spent their summer on a project with the Makerspace at Academic City. As part of my stay at Academic City, I worked on their project part-time and saw really cool applications of engineering. 

At my internship with IGED, I established a new pillar: Environmental Justice. I completed a literature review, recommendations for environmental justice as a new pillar, a work plan, and suggested content for a project we started. The literature review explores the intersection of climate change and gender inequality in the African context. The review mainly focuses on women and youth in Sub-Saharan Africa by defining climate impacts and gender inequality in the region and then links the two with literature that discusses women’s livelihoods, health and well-being, social vulnerabilities, case studies, and empirical evidence. The review finishes with adaptation strategies other researchers started on the continent. This review hopes to lay a foundation as to why environmental justice as a pillar for IGED is important. I am very excited for the programs that will come out of this. 

I helped conceptualize the first program with an idea my colleagues and I thought of. The project is a series of guidebooks that all define climate change. Each book in the series will focus on a particular target audience. I suggested content for eleven books including teachers & students, the LGBTQIA+ community, people suffering with mental health issues, people with physical or mental handicaps, women in conflict zones, women in agriculture, and women and youth in each region of Africa (West Africa, Northern Africa, Central Africa, Southern Africa, and East Africa). These guidebooks will also talk about the intersectional impact of climate change and the importance of understanding your positionality while offering readers hope and ways they can find support or take matters into their own hands. 

I was glad to be part of this work because women and youth in Africa bear the brunt of climate change and yet are left out of discussions surrounding climate change. IGED is not afraid of sensitive topics and is eager to create solutions to gender inequality such as strengthening women’s land rights and alleviating period poverty. Making recommendations was only a start to the project but I feel lucky to have worked on something that can reach a lot of people and hopefully give them the tools they need to confront climate change. 

While the internship with IGED took a large part of my professional time, I spent two days a week with the ETHOS students at Academic City. Even though I have zero engineering experience, I helped the ETHOS students and Academic City’s interns attack plastic waste in Ghana. Municipalities do not offer clean drinking water virtually anywhere so residents rely on plastic water bottles for drinking. While trash bins are few and far between and waste management is minimal, a lot of plastic waste is created. To mitigate this the Makerspace in Academic City created the SustainCity Project last year. Engineers created a large metal, hollow water bottle sculpture meant for people to throw their empty bottles in. The Makerspace built on that project this summer with the ETHOS students. The engineers built a shredder for the plastic bottles, a filament extruder, an injection mold, and a 3-D printer. The injection mold will be used to make little pennants for Academic City. I really enjoyed seeing this project unfold because I find it a very clever way to recycle. It was even greater to see that my personal waste was being recycled.

Between both commitments, Liesl, Georgia, and I traveled to Northern Ghana for a week. We joined Spark of Hope, an organization seeking a partnership with UD. They asked ETHOS students to join them in Tamale; I joined since I was in Accra and had an extra pair of hands. Since 2011, Spark of Hope has come to Kings Village (just north of Tamale) every other year. I was happy to work with Spark of Hope because they ensure long-term sustainability of projects the community wants to work on. During our week we built a playground in the Child Assessment Center - a place for kids rescued from human trafficking. We packed 300 water sachets to be distributed to the local area, held a medical outreach day and tested over 300 people for malaria, hepatitis, and hemoglobin levels and offered medicine when needed, helped build the foundation for a classroom, planted 1,000 trees, installed a solar panel for a bore hole pump, and taught kids art and music. Before the trip, all of these projects seemed ambitious, but after I saw what a group of dedicated people can do. I really enjoyed working alongside Kings Village residents; they taught me so much. A few things I learned was how to make cement, what the foundation of a building needs, and how groundwater pumping works - skills I never thought I’d learn in the field. 

I am really thankful for this summer because it felt like a really well-rounded learning experience between hands-on projects and research. I feel like I got to know people in each of these spaces, understand my positionality in them, and have relational and dialogical encounters. After this summer, I’ve returned with a dee[er respect and understanding of human rights and the work I wish to do.

Samantha Trajcevski is a senior at the University of Dayton with a major in Urban Sustainability as well as minors in Human Rights and Sociology. She has a background in community-based participatory action research and seeks to work with underserved communities to alleviate socio-economic barriers and inaccessibility to green spaces.