Through our focus on plastic waste, access to healthcare, and sustainable development, we are helping communities around Accra take steps toward a better life.
Astute Volunteers is a strictly not-for-profit volunteering organisation operating in Accra, Ghana. We provide sustainable and ethical placements that cater to all ages and skill sets, operating with the highest levels of transparency and efficiency to minimise costs for our volunteers and maximise the positive output we generate.
We aim to run inclusive and community-driven projects that are directly focused on tackling some of the real issues affecting local communities. These projects have been intelligently and sensitively designed to help achieve maximum social impact, utilising the individual skills and passion of our volunteers combined with the invaluable experience and extensive knowledge of our on-the-ground team.
Tackling the plastic waste crisis – this involves reducing the amount of waste, through collection and recycling processes, providing alternatives to plastic bag use and educating the community on the harmful impacts of plastic waste.
Improving access to healthcare and better sanitation through our medical placements, outreach clinics and borehole projects that increase access to clean water. Our educational programmes are also central to this and operate hand-in-hand with our medical programme.
Promoting sustainable development and community engagement via our teaching and construction projects as well as throughout our wider work. We strive to empower Ghana’s young people and combat levels of youth unemployment, allowing them to discover pride and a sense of agency within their own community.
You will often come away from volunteering feeling like you’ve gained more than you’ve given. That’s very natural - in fact, we believe that it’s important to recognise the value of the intercultural understanding that you gain from volunteering. We should be considering our perceptions of the global North-South ‘aid’ dynamic, and by extension how that impacts the people we serve. In this way, volunteers can have a fulfilling and enriched experience while also giving something back to the community which has facilitated it.
A core belief of our organisation is that voluntary aid should operate hand-in-hand with local entrepreneurship, with a shared aspiration towards sustainable development and a fairer distribution of aid. We seek to create as many local job opportunities as possible through our projects and work tirelessly to ensure that your individual work and contributions go directly to where it is most needed.
We believe that having an organisation headquartered in the place we work is a valuable factor towards achieving this – since it means better communication, local knowledge and more of a driving force on site. ‘Volunteer-led’ programmes inspire active participation and engagement of volunteers, but these can equally sometimes lack crucial direction that is required to achieve lasting change within the community.
At the same time, we are passionate about promoting the positivity, happiness and enjoyment of our volunteers in their work. Volunteering is a mutually beneficial experience, and we aim to leave our volunteers feeling like they've gained more than they've given.
Fill out our short application form to start your journey with Astute.
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