academics-from-ghana

"I got a wonderful education in Ghana … In high school, we used some of the same textbooks that I found were in use when I came to the US and I started my college education."

"GTE Labs was really great. It was like Bell Labs; there was a lot of freedom to follow your interests"

"So I wondered why I was getting these C’s. And I decided, maybe I need to move to a different English class. So I moved to a higher-level English class, and in that class the professor actually recognized my writing ability. From that point on, I got nothing but A’s in those English classes."

"When I came to the States in the fall of 1971, I started out at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania … I also thought about MIT, but at the time, I thought MIT was just for nerds."

"And I was also interested in science, I was interested in engineering. My father was a civil engineer; he was one of the lead engineers on Ghana’s Volta River Dam, the hydroelectric project that provided electricity to Ghana as well as a couple of neighboring natio"

"It is easy enough to be the first, we can each try something and be the first woman or the first African woman to do X, Y or Z. But, if it’s something worthwhile you don’t want to be the only. …I hope that I can, in any way, inspire someone to do what I have done but learn from my mistakes and do better than I have done."

"It's really just showing that there is more that you could be enjoying, that you could be learning from, that you could be reading."

"Sometimes people ask me how long it took me to put that together and I always say that it either took about a couple of years or all my life, depending on how you look at it."

"No, when you’re doing something you do it because you have a passion for doing it or you want to see it come to fruition but you’re not necessarily looking beyond that. It certainly has had an impact on people – people as readers, people as writers – because I think there were a lot of people who read that book who wanted to be writers and were influenced by it in one way or another. So, I guess it has had an influence and has a continuing influence; this new anthology demonstrates a continuing link to those writers and that whole literary history of women of African descent who are using words creatively, whether orature, spoken word, speeches, the written word, different genres."

"The internet has made it possible for writers to have greater visibility and to access different parts of their literary history but I don’t think things have necessarily changed so much towards literary responses to black women writers of African descent. Somehow a lot of praise is still kept on a few, as if they have to represent everybody, and they’re the only ones who will actually get that sort of literary accreditation and critical attention."

"It’s really just showing that there is more that you could be enjoying, that you could be learning from, that you could be reading. There are things that could open your mind, that could enlighten you that you have to seek out for yourself because it is not being offered within your formal curriculum."

"If I said to you, put together an anthology of two-hundred women of European descent that would include everyone from Jane Austen to JK Rowling – that would be difficult! You’d have left out a lot of people and that’s the case here: there are two-hundred wonderful contributors but there are many more that could’ve been in it – so it’s something that I’m proud of but something that in a strange way I’m not quite satisfied with. It’s never a question of saying this was a definitive anthology; the first one wasn’t definitive in that way and this one is not. But anyway it’s a start – I’ll do another one maybe."

"I don’t even know when they do that, sometimes I think that they can only think of a few people so they just bung me on! I think it’s an honour to be thought of in those grandiose terms but I’m not living my life with an ambition to be on some list and I’m not even sure that it’s true – but its a great honour!"

"I call on all-and-sundry especially the Alumni of the Hall to come to our aid because the facility when completed would not only be an asset for the Hall but for the entire University."

"If you were my year group person,1990, and afterwards, this is our time. Please let's come on board and support the works of Volta Hall. I'm sure there are things that we can use to encourage the young people."

"My role was equivalent to that of an Executive Director and I was charged with many responsibilities including ensuring the maintenance of the Hall to give students a serene environment for studies."

"Together with my predecessors, we were able to solve most of the Hall's problem before I was inducted, and we had a pending project called the "The Volta Hall's Women Resource Centre" but run out of funds."

"Ghana’s tremendous efforts aimed at revitalizing the economy. A good number of sectors of the economy have totally recovered. I am sure the economy will recover, the ultimate recovery of the economy rests on the shoulders of business owners."

"I know that women in the world I grew up in did not have a voice. The truth is that at the high table we still do not have enough women. The policymakers are still mainly men. We need to woo enlightened men to back our quest for equality because unless we make men champions for gender equality there will never be a permanent change."

"The situation for women has improved since then. We see laws on gender equality, maternity leave and equal opportunity. Since Beijing a number of countries embraced the concept of the girl child and several have adopted policies to ensure that girls go to school. At the University of Ghana, where I am Chancellor, there are more women students than men."

"That point was, and still is, that all women are working women and their work should be valued. Women do housework, care work, looking after children but none of this is reflected in the statistics. Outside of the home, their work tends to be low paid and in segregated areas. I am an economist. We at the ILO were looking at how women’s work could be counted, because what is not counted is not valued."

"Brand management is so important. Whilst not playing anything down, we must make sure that Ghana thrives in a competitive environment because things Ghanaian are known, loved and wanted. We must push and we will be okay. We are very modest as Ghanaians, we don’t blow our own trumpet. But in this competitive world, let’s put our Christian modesty aside and boast a little bit."

"I would like to reiterate the need to balance the training of the large number of lawyers that are needed in the country with the quality of education offered, as well as the provision of human and material resources of the institutions that train our lawyers."

"The world we live in has changed exponentially since the Legal Professions Act was passed 62 years ago, and there is an urgent need for its revision to reflect these changes and make the training of lawyers in Ghana more relevant and in tune with the world we live in today."