The partnership between Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges and the village of Dalun, Ghana began in 2006 with an ambitious Haverford student and his equally ambitious counterparts in Ghana. Andrew Garza traveled to Dalun for a college internship with by a microfinance institution. While in Dalun, Andrew worked closely with young leaders in the community to explore many potential areas for development, one of which included Dalun’s desire for an early childhood education center. One of these local community leaders, Manzah Habib, is now Managing Director of Titagya Schools.

A recent study conducted by the local, educational radio station found that children in Dalun sharply underperformed in comparison to children who started school years earlier in other villages and also noted the fact that many teenage girls in Dalun were kept from attending their own school because they had to take care of younger siblings. Andrew and his local partners, drawing from these findings and other research which found that $1 invested in early childhood education could reap up to $17 in social benefits for the community by engendering self-confidence, strong language skills and successful habits in children, grew deeply invested in the pursuit of quality childhood education for the village of Dalun.

In 2009, a dedicated staff began working full-time and opened the pre-school for 50 children — now three, and soon four, schools in two villages serve 210 children, and Titagya plans to grow. The school was named Titagya because, as the leaders of the school write, “it represented our mission of transforming lives through formal education. In Dagbani, the largest language in northern Ghana, Titagya means ‘we have changed’ or ‘we have grown.’” Today, Titagya Schools continue to abide by their name by expanding both in the form of physical schools and influence.

The partnership between Titagya and Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges began with individual student internships funded by Haverford’s Center for Peace and Global Citizenship together with an institutional exchange between Titagya Schools and the Bryn Mawr/Haveford Education Program. This exchanged began with a focus on key themes of interest to Titagya — the role of play and interaction, conflict resolution, and positive discipline.  Education students chronicled their own local field experiences with these themes in focus, some of this is documented here. Students also created thematic curricula for use in Titagya as the staff there were developing their curriculum development skills and experiences.  Then, with the 2012 Learning and Narrating Childhoods 360, 16 BiCo students got to travel to Dalun, and following that trip a series of additional exchanges led to the summer fellowship project currently supported by the Leadership, Innovation, and the Liberal Arts Center at Bryn Mawr and the Center for Peace and Global Citizenship at Haverford, as well as a formal partnership between Bryn Mawr and the University for Development Studies in Tamale, Ghana.