Finished School Essay

Hey I just finished a school project for Social Studies. The assignment was to describe how Ghana is a developing country. Here is my final draft:

Hannah Lybbert

Form 1A UJHS

Social Studies Project

Due date: November 4, 2013

Ghana is a Developing Country: Discuss

Ghana is one out of many developing countries. Before I describe how Ghana is a developing county, I will describe the word developing. When someone says something is developing it means that something is changing in a specific way. You can also say that is becoming stronger or improving. A euphemism for developing is poor. The reason why people don’t say “poor” is because it sounds you don’t have anything useful any more. But when you say developing it sounds like there is still a future to life.

Compared to a developed country, people live very differently in Ghana. The homes in Ghana are built out of mud or a mixture of sand and cement because it is too expensive to pay for a house made out of wood and cement. I have seen some partially built houses that have collapsed from heavy rain fall, earthquakes etc. Mostly in the northern part of Ghana, the roofs are made from straw.

People in Ghana also wear different clothes. Some people wear torn shirts and shorts and some people wear really nice dresses made with Ghanaian fabrics. Most people wear nice clothes when out getting groceries or on walks but when people work, they (most of the time) wear dirty clothes. When a lady goes to buy her eggs she is normally in nicer clothes the the person she is buying her eggs from.

Another way I can tell that Ghana is developing is that food, nutrition and health is not great but still improving. Most people in Ghana grow their own food (e.g. Plantain, tomato, pepper etc.) because they can’t afford to buy their own food. Also, if people are only eating foods they can grow, they may not get all of the kinds of food they need. Health in Ghana can also be pretty poor. Some families cannot invest in their child’s or their own health because the money he\she is getting from their job cannot pay for a person’s health.

Nutrition can also be a problem, mostly in the northern part of Ghana. Children are most likely to become malnourished because they are still growing and developing. Some children suffer from diseases like kwashiorkor, which happens when a child is not getting enough proteins.

Looking at education can also help a person to know that Ghana is a developing country. A lot of people in Ghana have good education. These people can grow up to be very smart, that gives them many job opportunities. But sadly there are still some families that cannot afford their child’s education. So some of these children, when they grow up, are illiterate.  When a person can’t read or write they will not have a lot of good job opportunities, which can make life really hard for these people. When a person does not have a good job but has a family, he/she will not be able to pay for the basic needs of their family.

I can also tell that Ghana is a developing county by the condition of the roads and how some people (mostly up north) don’t have electricity. Roads in Ghana can be very bad. They are either made out of dirt or asphalt. When the roads are made out of asphalt they normally have a lot of potholes. Some villages farther up north do not have electricity. They don’t have fans or air conditioning, so they live their lives very differently than people in Accra or Cape Coast do. More important than being comfortable are things like lights at night for learning or cleaning, cell phones and radios for communication. 

You can also call roads, gutters, electricity, and running water infrastructure, which is stuff that the government provides for people. So when roads are built the government has to pay for the building of the road. The government pays for this infrastructure with tax money. However it is very difficult to collect taxes when the income of their citizens is very little and is very hard to track. When they cannot collect taxes, the roads are left unfixed (more potholes), and the water and electricity is not provided because the government spends their little money on the basic needs of the country.

What I have written about falls into two different groups: how people are poor and how the government is poor. First I wrote about how people are poor by how they live and dress. Then I wrote about how the government is poor by the infrastructure. I also wrote about how the government is poor because people are poor and, in the opposite direction, how people are poor because the government is poor.

I think that Ghana is still developing and that developing is not easy. But I also think that at some point in time Ghana will become a developed country.