Victoria Koomson

Victoria Koomson is organizing the women of coastal Ghanaian migratory fishing communities by introducing a series of technical innovations and using the resulting increased incomes to help promote further economic and community development.

Victoria Koomson is increasing the earning power of fishermen's wives in coastal Ghana by introducing inexpensive and simple techniques that allow them to preserve their fish in bulk. Her organization, the Central and Western Fishmongers Improvement Association, is replacing traditional mud ovens with larger, durable ovens that can smoke more fish and are less susceptible to rain damage. Having preserved the fish in bulk, the women are no longer under pressure to sell their catch immediately, and lose fewer fish to spoilage. They are now able to maximize profits by marketing to the distant interior.Her project, which started with a relatively simple technical innovation, has resulted in many socio-economic benefits for these communities. Victoria teaches women to manage and invest their increased income in cooperative ventures, and helps them gain access to the banking system for the first time.
Through land donations from local chiefs facilitated by Victoria, these migratory "squatter" villages have acquired their own land on the coast. The women initiate and pay for improvements themselves, without any outside funding. They have used their increased income to build bath houses, schools, and sheds for selling food and fresh water and have set money aside for the repair of roads to the interior. Because many of these improvements benefit those previously settled in the area as well, the new fisherfolk villages are increasingly accepted as permanent neighbors.
Having seen the way to greater prosperity, the women of the fishing villages are more receptive to trying other changes in their lives. The new villages are centers of education and economic activity. Victoria has organized literacy classes and hygiene and health education. The families involved with the Association are better fed and better clothed, and for the first time have access to education, family planning and medical care.
As the women work to improve themselves and their communities, their increased economic independence and self-respect have also resulted in more equal gender relations.

With its limited resources, Ghana's government has not attempted to reach the isolated, unorganized, and politically insignificant coastal fishing communities. The area has been bypassed by the main expressway, and fish cannot easily be carried to market before spoiling. When the fishermen bring in their catch in the evenings, the lack of storage facilities forces their fishmonger wives to dispose of the fish before nightfall or lose much to spoilage. Thus, they sell fish with little profit and are exploited by middlemen. Due to illiteracy and lack of access to commercial banking, the women of these squatter villages deposit their money with unofficial bankers: daily susu (money) collectors, who often make off with their meager savings. As many of these families have been migratory, their marshy coastal area has remained undeveloped, and they live without a fresh water supply, electricity, waste disposal and access roads by which they could market their fish. Where they have settled they are without legal rights or security of tenure, and so they do not bother to construct lasting buildings or community infrastructure. Lacking day-care and schools, children accompany their mothers to the beach and miss out on formal education.
The women suffer the additional effects of low status and powerlessness in relation to husbands in their traditionally highly patriarchal society.

Victoria's basic strategy is to introduce simple technical innovations in fish processing to migratory fishing communities to initiate a "virtuous cycle" of social development. Increased income resulting from new technology is used to invest in community improvements. Victoria provides the designs for the initial technology and ongoing training to build skills required by the development cycle that ensues. The first major hurdle is to enable the women to generate sufficient surplus to lay claim to land and establish permanent villages. Once that is accomplished, a series of improvement activities begin to both increase incomes further and to establish the new village as a "good neighbor."Victoria implements her project in a series of stages, each lasting up to a year. She starts by identifying and training community leaders and mobilizing community members to build kilns. Since most of the women are illiterate and have had no previous access to banking transactions, Victoria helps them to open individual accounts with the Agro-Development Bank. As members of the Association, the women commit themselves to saving twenty percent of their earnings in these new accounts for later reinvestment or as an emergency fund. This provides some financial independence and introduces notions of investment and a "rainy day" fund. Most importantly, however, it creates a basis for cooperative investment in further technical improvements or expanded business activities or, as Victoria also encourages, to undertake community improvement projects.
Throughout the process, Victoria constantly trains the women to appraise and refine their strategies, and reach out to surrounding communities and agencies. Road building, for example, is promoted on the grounds that it both helps the women get to market and is deeply appreciated by their neighbors. Literacy or health education classes are open to surrounding villages. Community centers built by the women attract public services, such as mobile health clinics, benefiting fisherfolk and neighbors alike.
Victoria has been successful in expanding upon initial technical innovations. Over the years, for example, village members have had to travel far into the interior to find firewood to smoke the fish. In addition to devising more efficient methods of fish-smoking which use less wood, the Association has acquired five acres of land on which to plant trees for firewood, which will be harvested on a sustainable basis. The Agro-Forestry Department and some international nongovernmental organizations have supplied seeds.
With encouragement from Victoria, the Association members have designed a cheaper and more durable wire net for the smoking trays, which replaces the traditional wire net commonly used for fencing and other purposes. Victoria plans to introduce this innovation to all fishing communities along the coastline of Ghana.
Victoria has also managed to incorporate disabled people into her project. In collaboration with partner nongovernmental organizations, she has established a center where disabled people are trained to weave cloth, stoles, decorative banners and wastepaper baskets.
Parallel with this process of deepening and extending her work in the first four villages, Victoria is currently in the process of expanding the geographic scope of her project by introducing the Association to fisherfolk up and down the coast. The women of the Association have also extended aid to refugees from Cote d'Ivoire, Liberia, and Nigeria, and are creating a special village at Anomabo for refugees.

Born into a farming family of five girls in a rural village, Victoria displayed leadership and organizational ability from an early age. When she was twelve, she mobilized rural adults whose crop of oranges was about to spoil. She organized alternative transportation and got the produce to market. After her mother's death, she played an adult role in her household even while going to school. A graduate of a teacher training college, Victoria taught home economics in primary schools for fifteen years and later served as a headmistress. During this time, she cultivated an interest in non-formal education and teacher training.
Victoria's early rural background helps her identify with the challenges faced by other rural people, and she combines her interest in education with a strong interest in development issues. She joined the National Council on Women and Development in 1981. Before establishing the Association in 1990, she was involved in helping women in the Western region of Ghana to establish small-scale industries and organize into farm producers and consumers' cooperatives.