Your MC Drives a Bus and Hates AIDS

Welcome to Neoplan Station. Drive Protected.

Neoplan Station near central Accra is a fairly typical West African mass transit station. You move through it by squeezing between determined passengers, grabby bus boys, hawkers with incredible balance and menacing steel busses that are often in motion and rarely concerned about pedestrians. There is one chaotic point for access and egress. Otherwise it is enclosed by four walls, each perhaps one hundred meters long. All of those are completely full of small businesses and associations, most of which are restaurants, ticket bureaus or the offices of driver unions. Every wall is painted with advertisements and most of the advertisements are obscured by the colorful displays of the card table vendors who fill the walkways.

Ghana Social Marketing Firm, or GSMF, (see the feature article Vulnerable Populations in Ghana) rents one of these offices near the back, behind a couple of women who sell palmfrond brooms, packets of dish soap and plastic buckets. You could squeeze just about half a taxi into the space they have allotted to their "Drive Protected" headquarters—they chose to fill it with an overloaded desk, a large television and a shelving unit full of t-shirts, stickers and hats that boast their "If it's not on, it's not in" condom slogan. If they were hoping to attract commercial drivers to this office with the overwhelmed sign advertising its presence, you would be forced to conclude that they are idiots. But they are not idiots. They have also taken charge of the most easily overlooked and yet the most obtrusive real estate in the car park: each and every poll top megaphone. Also, their desk is not overloaded with nonsense paperwork; it is sagging under the weight of a massive and modern PA system that enables members of the Drive Protected team to address every single person in the car park all at once.

Mr. Boadi and Otema Dey

They are Bus Station Radio. They do not seek to terrify passengers with warnings about unattended bags, they do not concern themselves with the names of people about to miss their chicken busses, they do not forbid you to smoke cigarettes and there is nothing like a schedule for them to trumpet into everyone's frenzy. Instead, they use this resource to communicate messages of social importance to their captive audience—an audience that includes the vulnerable populations of long haul commercial drivers, impoverished young female hawkers and the less affluent people who are forced to ride in the famously dangerous and uncomfortable Tro Tro busses.

Everybody likes to talk and nobody likes to listen to the same person all the time; so, GSMF needed to impose a sensible order upon their noise making apparatus. At the moment, Otema Dey is their Station Coordinator; this job and others are her responsibility. Ms. Dey is an attractive young woman from a relatively privileged background who does not have much in common with the working class drivers and vendors at Neoplan Station. After graduating from university, having studied geography and philosophy, she traveled around the United States and the United Kingdom. She returned at the end of her summer holiday to perform her national service. (In Ghana, everyone is required to dedicate a year of their young adulthood to a job that will help to better the situation of Ghanaians. Many people in the social services begin as year-long interns and then opt to remain in positions of greater reward and responsibility.)

Otema began her service in Neoplan Station within one day of returning from the western world. It was fairly overwhelming. She says, "I wasn't too sure if I wanted to stay—after a while, though, it became fun." At the beginning, she says, natives of the station "didn't know if I was friend or foe"; that has changed and now she is proud to say, "I call them my uncles." This was not an overnight transition. It required this outsider at the beginning of her professional career to relate to everyone around her in a humble and personable fashion. She began taking the time to sit around and speak with young vendors and drivers in a fashion appropriate to their interests and education. (She remarked, "Most of these people dropped out of school.") People who were originally suspicious of her intentions, uncomfortable around her smart style of dressing and made defensive by her educated manner of speech, warmed to her persistent and caring presence.

Mr. Boadi on the radio

It is not, however, Otema's job to fill the airwaves with pronouncements about health and HIV/AIDS—in fact, she prefers to stay off the radio. She is, however, careful to make sure that the megaphones are not always lecturing and educating. To ensure that the general audience does not begin to resent the speaker system or the important messages, she makes sure to incorporate music and significant sporting events into the schedule.

The union of Tro Tro drivers and the union of salespeople have elected over a dozen of their members to participate in training sessions run by GSMF. Many of those selected are no longer driving; instead they are retired and concentrate on administrative issues and the representation of their unions. These influential elders are trained on health-related issues by Ghana's Social Marketing Firm and then overseen by Otema as they communicate with the people around them, through the radio and otherwise.

They are a very diverse bunch and they tend to be passionate and outspoken. Mr. Boadi, an executive member of the union, has been volunteering as a peer educator for two years. He is in his mid-fifties, a retired Christian driver with influence and energy. He says "We go out as apostles to teach the good news, to preach on the microphone." He is excited about a shift in receptivity. He says that the rise in hospital admissions due to HIV/AIDS finally drove home the reality of the disease and that people became more able to hear his teachings. He is deeply grateful for the training he has received and "takes it upon himself as a duty" to share the information that he possesses about health and wellness.

Al Haji Issah Omar

His Muslim counterpart Al Haji Issah Omar was one of the first to be selected as a peer educator; he has more than five years of experience in the position. Like Mr. Boadi, he feels morally compelled to serve in this capacity and he echoed Mr Boadi's perception that HIV/AIDS is being taken more seriously now than when the program first got under way. He says that "superstitions that it had been around for a long time" prevented people from acknowledging it as a new and separate threat. Before the PA was obtained by the Drive Protected office, Al Haji Issah Omar and his earlier colleagues conducted small chats with drivers in Ga, Hausa, Kree and other local languages or they boarded crowded busses, to stand in the aisle and discuss HIV or to demonstrate the usage of condoms.

For this devout Muslim, condoms can be a complicated issue. He says, "We got to know condoms through HIV; one way or another, it helps both sides." He is talking about the Muslim "side" and the non-Muslim "side." He says, "The evil ones who cannot keep themselves moral should protect themselves, but we emphasize that condoms can break." He adds, "As a Muslim, when I teach I include God in it and I don't preach my brother Muslims about condoms." Al Haji is catering to a particular audience about a sensitive issue and he seems to be doing so with success.

There are nineteen peer educators; some of them speak one language and focus on one gender; others speak a different language and focus on a particular age group or religious persuasion. Some of them prefer to work discreetly in small groups and some of them like "to preach." Otema Dey confided, "They argue sometimes," but she says they maintain a positive outlook as a group and their diversity of belief and approach is a real strength.

While many countries devote special attention to their drivers and to their transportation hubs, the decision to actually inhabit them (and Neoplan is by no means the only transport hub in Ghana that is receiving this level of attention) is exceptional. GSMF's workers have the time and incentive to build relationships with these people, and that increases the likelihood that the people they speak with will adopt healthy changes in their behavior. Drive Protected has also empowered community figures. These retired drivers are fired up by their newly bestowed role as educators and regardless of their differences of opinion or belief, they are enthusiastic about this program and confident that it is making strides.


Vulnerable Populations (Ghana Social Marketing Firm)
Ghana's Talented Comic Book Artist
Africans have their voices heard at the G8 Summit
Goats Hold the Cure to AIDS
Protecting mothers and babies from HIV transmission in rural Ghana
A Growing Support Network in Ghana's Volta Region