The Ghana Small Business Development Project

The Honors Program at the University of North Florida has established a bi-annual study abroad trip to Ghana, West Africa. The trip offers students the opportunity to gain an integrated perspective of the world outside the United States and other Western cultures. As a part of the May 2003 trip, several development projects were undertaken in cities throughout Ghana. The aim of the projects was both to contribute to the participating communities and to offer UNFstudents an opportunity in which they could apply the knowledge and skills learned in the classroom to real life experiences. In addition to community health and civil society projects, one student created and implemented the Ghana Small Business Development Project, a one-day workshop which focused on empowering two groups of women to become entrepreneurs.This paper is a brief review of the project’s specifications, after a discussion of the changing nature of development policy and practice over the last half of the twentieth century. The Ghana Small Business Development Project was designed to utilize a new perspective of development, often called bottom-up or participatory development, which has emerged in the aftermath of the failure of many development projects implemented during the in the second half of the twentieth century. The business development project aimed at using modern development theories to surmount past developmental shortcomings, thereby generating a means of income, creating employment, and raising the overall standard of living for a group of Ghanaian women