Why sustainability matters, aka celebrating #TremendousTuesday

A quality rights training in Central region.

On Tuesday 28 March I started the Twitter thread #TremendousTuesday to celebrate the 5 separate programme activities taking place that day. The third year of the programme ended 31 March, and earlier that week we were already looking ahead to the fourth and final year of the programme, with sustainability as our watch-word.

One of the challenges of working in development can be the projectisation of work where initiatives only exist for the life of the project or programme. At Ghana Somubi Dwumadie we have worked hard to ensure the work we do is aligned with our stakeholders’ ambitions and undertaken in partnership with them.

One activity, was held in Kumasi with leaders from the 16 regions in Ghana, led by Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection and the SDGs Advisory Unit under the Office of the President. Having developed a roadmap for operationalisation we were reviewing how to implement Ghana's Commitments from the 2022 Global Disability Summit into regional and district plans. This is critical for ensuring that international commitments made, move beyond being ‘paper commitments’ and become practical actions.

Our grants team were also on the road that Tuesday, as part of a several week-long supportive monitoring trip to our grantees. We have 2 open grants rounds currently, our Evidence and Effective grantees working on advocacy and social behaviour change initiatives addressing stigma and discrimination towards people with disabilities or mental health conditions. We’re also working with our newer Legacy and Sustainability grantees to build their capacity for the future. One of these organisations has just secured their second ever grant!

Meanwhile, over in Sunyani, national convener and programme consortium partner BasicNeeds-Ghana was holding a meeting of the Mental Health Alliance. The Alliance is a group of like-minded organisations working across most regions in Ghana who coordinate and collaborate on matters of mental health in Ghana. The Alliance includes civil society and media among others, including some of our former and current grantees who we’ve been delighted to connect into the Alliance. One of the key issues to arise was the lack of regular supply of psychotropic drugs for people with mental health conditions, leading to relapses and associated knock-on impacts on people’s lives.

Group work at psychotropic drugs meeting in Accra.

Because we’re acutely aware of this challenge, back in Accra, another consortium partner Tropical Health was working closely with the Mental Health Authority, convening a meeting with clinicians to explore issues of psychotropic drug supply and exploring possible solutions to this entrenched and complicated issue. A second meeting was held later in the week with procurement experts to build out possible solutions and approaches. We’ll be producing a briefing on this soon to help share knowledge and understanding towards possible solutions.

Our consortium partners from Kings College London (KCL) were in Anloga as part of a multi-day trip to visit our district mental healthcare plan implementation sites, providing support and supervision on the implementation of the plans, and gathering evidence of their impact to inform possible future scale-up of this approach. Early indications are that having district-level mental healthcare plans increases detection and reduces the treatment gap of mental health conditions at a local level. Circling back to the road mapping meeting in Kumasi, one of the KCL team joined us to present on this very topic, sharing emerging findings and lessons with regional heads.

Some of our team and participants in Anloga.

I hope that gives you a flavour of some of the work we’ve been doing. This is a complex programme of work across multiple partners and work streams, but, everything is connected. We’re working hard to build on what has been done before, and, in the final year of the programme, to ensure that stakeholders in mental health and disability in Ghana find the work we’ve done useful and something which can be built on for the future.