WEA Development Education Project - Eunice Campbell

Description:A major part of this project was researching and finding out about Africa and the West Indies, Jamaica. In groups we discussed political, economical and social challenges. At the start of sessions we would collect and share any bit of information that we either saw or heard from TV,the radio, or read from a newspaper article in order to understand what was going on globally.

I used the computer in class and managed lots of internet researches with print outs. I also visited the Central library archives department to get some resources and I finally decided to work on Fairtrade bananas. I heard on Radio WM that Fairtrading bananas helped to purchase a fire engineer in Africa. How fantastic is that! I learnt that Fairtrade is for life and that every year people are joining up. There was a Fairtrade bus going around giving out information in Birmingham. Also that a lot of churches are passing on the message of Fairtrade.

“Fairtrade has a fund raising Foundation and receives grants from DfID, the European Union, Comic Relief, charitable trusts, other foundations and from member organisations like Oxfam. Further donations are received from individual supporters, schools, workplaces and faith groups. This fundraised income is used to support the Foundation’s awareness raising work, to provide investment in developing new products for Fairtrade and resourcing the lobbying and policy work on Fairtrade”. (Extract from Internet access www.fairetrade.org.uk/get_involved/donate/ 27/02/08)

Photograph courtesy of Veena Gogna