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Farsighted enterprise is also the business of women in Ghana, and the prospect of making money brought Sarah Galloway Hage-Ali back from a comfortable life in England. In 1994 Hage-Ali bought Accra-based Sapad Manufacturing Co., Ghana's only maker of sanitary napkins. Changing the company's name to Fay International, she revamped its marketing philosophy into an ambitious campaign to teach Ghana's often infected women to use her hygienic product. Only 15% to 20% of Ghanaian women use sanitary towels; genital ailments are among the most prevalent problems of women patients. In the past two years, the company has conducted more than 30 workshops, bringing its message to secondary schools, village associations, market traders.
Lucia Quachey, president of the Ghana Association of Women Entrepreneurs, is proud that Hage-Ali is showing the world the other side of the African woman. "Not just the woman with the child on her back, pregnant, wood on her head," she explains, "but the African women who operate computers, who employ people, who generate resources to help in the growth of the national economy." Those are the women Nana Konadu Agyemang Rawlings, Ghana's First Lady, has drawn into the biggest and best-organized women's association in Ghana, the 31st December Women's Movement, named after the day her husband took over the country. Before, she says, "we did not ask for our due; we were not politicized."
Five-year-old Fridous Abu Tofic is learning simple arithmetic along with 295 other preschoolers because the movement opened a day-care center in Nima, a Muslim enclave in one of Accra's poorest and most neglected neighborhoods. 31st December runs tree-planting programs, immunizes children, offers family-planning services and initiates rural-development projects. Once funded by foreign donors, it now gets 95% of its operating funds from income-generating programs, one of which provides the army with bread and a local staple called kenkey. The movement, claiming some 1.5 million members, even produces a children's television program. "We have changed the face of Ghanaian women," says Mrs. Rawlings.
You might call it a second-chance African revolution. What every country striding forward shows is that progress comes first to those who adopt the principles and practices of capitalist democracy. There are some common lessons here that any African nation can learn: free-market economics works, including privatization, entrepreneurship and often the stern measures of wholesale reform to jump-start failed economies. So does agricultural self-sufficiency, starting from the bottom up. And decentralization, spreading development outside urban capitals to the vast rural majority. And women's empowerment.
Other elements may be harder to acquire but are no less essential: Good governance, caring for the welfare of the people, not the potentates. New leaders, pragmatic and progressive, honest and efficient in their exercise of power. Eritrea's President Issaias is but one of them, along with South Africa's Nelson Mandela, Uganda's Yoweri Museveni, Rwanda's Paul Kagame, Botswana's Quett Ketumile Masire. National reconciliation where necessary, national cohesion everywhere, the sublimation of narrow loyalties to a larger good.