Holy Cross sisters were invited to Ghana in 1983 by the Holy Cross brothers to complete the family of Holy Cross in that country and enter into collaboration with them in their pioneer efforts, since 1957, to bring Holy Cross education to Ghana.

Initially the sisters took teaching assignments through the Diocesan Department of Religious Education in the Western Region. Later, Sister Jane Chantal Method’s founding and directorship of Damien Center, a treatment center for the mentally ill, set standards for a culture that has traditionally regarded mental disease as demonic possession and a source of shame.

A typical primary classroom in Ghana,  St. Martha’s Catholic School in Kasoa.

In the early 1990s Ghanaian Sisters Margaret Mary Nimo and Esther Adjoa Entsiwah entered the Congregation, and have continued the Congregation’s educational ministry tradition. In their own roles as teachers in the state-operated public school system, they bring Holy Cross values to their students and classroom settings.

Historically, Ghanaian education has been offered along two parallel tracks: informal and formal education. Informal education took place in apprenticeship agreements with crafts and trades people. Formal education began with “castle schools” set up in slave forts for the children of colonizers and the African women who bore them. Later, missionary schools provided other models.

Catholic schools are part of the national education system in Ghana.

In the early 1970s the Ghanaian government established a national system that tried to provide not only academic preparation for higher learning but vocational training for those students inclined toward the trades rather than the professions.

As in other impoverished countries, in Africa and elsewhere, schools were built, children would come, but inadequate funding and infrastructure considerations made equipment, good teachers, even textbooks and instructional materials scarce. With little to work with in the classroom, the dropout rate among both students and qualified teachers soared.

St. Martha’s Catholic School 

The state instituted new reforms in 1988 to upgrade curriculum, teacher education and fiscal management. The system still often struggles, however, to provide quality education.

Empowering others to carry out such a vision was one of Sister Maggie’s dreams, but after working two years in the public school system she realized how difficult it was for one person to change a system where classroom resources, system values and teacher qualifications were not equal to achieving the Holy Cross vision of the education of the “whole person.”

Today she dreams of a Holy Cross-sponsored school that would provide a model for her country and effect much-needed positive change in the lives of Ghanaian youth.

~From a report by Sisters Margaret Mary Nimo, CSC, and Esther Adjoa Entsiwah, CSC