Around 2011, a group of Australian nurses raised funds to build a maternity clinic in the small village of Sra in Ghana.

Turning Teardrops into Joy was founded as a sustainable social enterprise to generate funding for the second phase of that project, to keep the clinic operating effectively. The main component of that assistance has been a scholarship to train one of the Sra villagers to become a midwife.

Our contributions

Bella visited Sra in 2016. Her son Will went as well … yes that’s the same Will who was the weekend barista at Grant St before he moved to London.

Since 2013, Turning Teardrops into Joy has donated over $28,000 to this project.

A young girl from Sra has completed her midwifery training and is now working as a midwife in Sra. We subsidised her wage for over a year until the government funding for her position was released.

From aid to trade

Having built the clinic and trained a midwife, the third stage of this project is to establish a commercial structure so that the village can generate their own finances to maintain and equip the clinic. This takes the project from aid to trade, and empowers the village rather than making them dependent on well-meaning hand-outs.

We have been working with the village leaders on the details of how that might function. Together, we investigated options of producing jewelry, and fabric printing, for exported to Australia. But what seems more likely to success at this stage is planting a mango orchard. The mangos are growing but it will take a few years to make that financially viable.